Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance

Bronze winner in the Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com 2015 Products of the Year Backup Hardware category.

The Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance is a scale-out device that functions as a relational database management system (RDBMS) data protection target, with the ability to do linear backup and restores scaling from 580 TB to more than 10 PB of usable capacity that it can move at 216 TB per hour.

Introduced last year, the appliance is built only for Oracle database protection, doing continuous protection for critical databases while offloading backup processes from production servers to reduce overhead. The Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance is integrated with RMAN and Oracle Enterprise Manager.

The Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance is designed to drastically reduce data-loss exposure, reducing it to sub-seconds. Its architecture uses a delta-push and delta-store method in which it only sends and stores changed blocks from the database to the appliance.

The system creates virtual full copies during the restores from the blocks and delta store to help cut down on the need for lengthy backups. When taking into account virtual full backups, Oracle says the system performs at 2 PB per hour. The continuous, incremental backup process captures real-time database changes without impacting production performance

The Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance also can directly archive database backups to tape storage, with the archiving operations running 24/7 to improve drive utilization. Its changed data-store can be used to create virtual full database copies at any desired point-in-time, and the appliance can replicate data in real-time to a remote Oracle recovery appliance or to an Oracle Database Backup Cloud service. Database blocks are continuously validated to eliminate data corruption during the transmission process.

One judge called the Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance unique and said it goes beyond RMAN integration.

"It's RDBMS-controlled data protection with huge levels of compression and zero RPO and RTO," he said. "For non-stop business continuity environments, it's an excellent value."

The hardware is a base rack with a minimum configuration of two compute nodes and three storage servers that can scale up to 18 nodes.