Re: RMAN backup validate
- From: MARK BRINSMEAD <mark.brinsmead@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Hans Forbrich <fuzzy.graybeard@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2015 00:05:30 -0400
I used to work for a shop that did real honest-to-goodness DR tests.
Every six months the IT manager would walk through the datacenter with a
stack of plane tickets -- enough for about 1 in 3 of the staff. These were
the ones deemed to have "survived" a simulated disaster.
They would board a flight in Chicago that evening, go to their DR
datacenter in New York, and they had 3 days to have the entire business
system up and operational from nothing but the most recent set of backup
tapes. One copy of those tapes was sent on the same flight as the IT
people, while the second copy was kept in a fireproof vault. (These were
BOTH copies -- the originals, of course, were "destroyed" when the
datacenter was lost.)
Expensive? Extremely. But that company actually knew they could survive
complete loss of their active datacenter.
That was 20 years ago. I have not seen the like since. Heck, most IT
shops I have seen in the last 10 years don't even own a tape-drive, and
look at me like I'm crazy when I suggest one. Backing up to tape is now
"passe", it seems. This may be more a reflection of the kind of clients I
have been exposed to over the past 10 years, though, than an indication of
IT trends in general. :-)
On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 7:36 PM, Hans Forbrich <fuzzy.graybeard@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> On 14/03/2015 1:53 PM, Andrew Kerber wrote:
>
>> You should also do a full restore periodically to verify the validity of
>> your recovery plan. At least every 6 months.
>>
>>
> In paper, I agree ...
>
> As long as we have identified a recovery plan, and possibly even have have
> distinguished between HA and DR - which some do, and some don't - it is a
> great idea to test whether the recovery plan actually works and whether
> people involved in implementing it actually can do so.
>
> I do note that some organizations have a variety of recovery ideas, and
> sometimes even formal plans, for a variety of situationsing ; tier 1 might
> involve RAC, tier 2 might involve local Standby even Active DG, tier 3
> might involve offsite DR practices.
>
> I also note that the recovery plan can not be limited to the database
> piece. Too many apps have hard-coded stuff, such as database server names
> or IP addresses. Testing the recovery plan must involve more than just
> checking whether we can restore the database.
>
> I finally note that good DR readiness is blinking expensive, is based on
> analysis that few actually do, is generally Pi in the sky, and is rarely
> really supported by management other than "of course we need it". It would
> be interesting to create a Jeremy poll to find out how many actually do
> perform end-to-end recovery plan testing.
>
> /Hans
> happy Pi day everyone
>
>
> --
> //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
>
>
>
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