Enterprise Organizations face many challenges today which includes ever-increasing SLAs, lower downtime, and the ability for application or business owners to quickly recover application to a disaster recovery site with minimal data loss for business continuity. Many customers running large enterprise databases have a compliance requirement for disaster recovery.

Dell EMC PowerFlex provides asynchronous storage-consistent remote replication that caters to the needs of disaster recovery, providing the ability to restart Oracle database instances with small data loss after unplanned outages of the local site.

In addition to disaster protection, PowerFlex replication also allows the creation of remote snapshots. These snapshots can be used to instantiate restartable Oracle database instances for purposes such as test, development, and reporting. They can also be used to offload backups from the local site to the remote site when archive logs are also replicated.

Many organizations require the ability to periodically test their disaster recovery strategy. PowerFlex replication Test Failover feature allows such testing to take place without interruption of the local site protection. A remote snapshot is automatically taken and mapped to the remote replication volumes. This allows the organization to test their strategy at the remote site, even while production database replication continues undisturbed. When the test is complete, the remote device mapping is automatically restored, and the snapshot is discarded.

By using PowerFlex consistent replication, not only the Oracle database, whether it is a single instance or cluster, can be protected, but also the replication can include any external data, message queues, and/or other databases with dependencies on each other. Such Enterprise consistency solution protects all these related applications from a disaster, allowing the business to resume operations much faster at the remote site, instead of trying to coordinate a point of consistency between applications if they were using native, independent replications, each failing at slightly different time.

This paper provides best practices and deployment examples of using Oracle RAC database with PowerFlex asynchronous replication.