A few weeks ago I wrote about Oracle backups and restore/recovery. A company called “DRS” for the sake of anonymity was mentioned. They are still struggling with the (test) restore and recovery of a Windows based Oracle server.
My company has started to take a serious look at this field (cloud backups that is). We have initiated a search for a suitable partner that can provide the infrastructure needed for such services. Recent events have led us to believe that hosting infrastructure should indeed be handled by experts. By that I mean expert in every sense of the word: highly skilled/experienced and works only/mainly with … The former is just as important as the latter. I sometimes meet people that work only with one technology/product; they automatically assume that this makes them experts.
We want to create a service for backing up Oracle databases. It will use the native backup utilities for creating local backups. These backups will be available for regular restore and recovery operations. In addition, they will be transferred (encrypted and compressed) to a remote site. The encryption key will only be available at the client site, making it safe to store backups from several customers on the same backup server. Initially this will be a pure off-site storage solutions, future versions will have the ability to perform test restore/recovery operations at the site of the remote backup. The ultimate goal is to create a full disaster recovery solution for small and medium sized businesses.
In future posts I will describe the technical solution in more detail. Specifically; I will discuss bandwidth requirements, Oracle features needed and how to seed the backup with the help of removable media.
