Carrenza gives Oracle users a DRaaS option

Having resilience and protection against unforeseen problems is essential for any firm, whether these issues are caused by human error, hardware problems or natural disasters. The trouble is, many of them still view disaster recovery as a gamble, not least because of the perceived expense of defending the business against a problem that is often seen as `unlikely.

And historically the issue of expense has been real. It has meant either investing heavily in systems and software that provide the needed service redundancy – yet might stay redundant for all their service life – or taking the hit on time lost to the business while backup copies of applications and data are reloaded – assuming of course that backups have been taken.  

It is, however, increasingly being recognised that cloud-based solutions can offer an extra level of safeguards compared with on-premises and backup sites only. Not only that, such services can be made available and usable quickly, and at prices which make gambling look a poor bet.

Just such a cloud-delivered Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), aimed at businesses running Oracle-based platforms, has been just introduced by Carrenza. To offer this, the company is working with its existing partner, Explorer UK, which specialises in providing Oracle support for the range of e-commerce solutions Carrenza delivers. As it has a large Oracle customer base, is intimately familiar with the unique demands of these firms.

, stated: "What DRaaS offers companies is the peace of mind that all their essential applications and data will be easily recoverable in the event of a catastrophic failure, regardless of Oracle Database Edition,” said Jon Lingard, at Explorer UK. "There is a gap in the market at the moment for customers that are hosting their own Oracle instances, but recognise there are often risks associated with non-tiered disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.

“These are frequently managed on-site by personnel who often may not have the necessary expertise in this area. Couple that with Oracle’s licensing policies and it means that customers must have a seasoned and trusted partner to discuss their DR strategy with".

With this partnership, Carrenza will be able to provide customers with the benefits of its experience in delivering highly-resilient infrastructure for Oracle RAC clusters and single instances alike. For example, for Red Nose Day in 2009 it delivered an Oracle Database 11g in a stretched RAC cluster, Active Dataguard and Oracle BIEE, the first time this configuration of Oracle’s flagship database had been put into live production.

The new solution is likely to benefit a large number of customers, as Explorer has noted that while many of its users have one geographic site that is highly resilient, they lack secondary backups to protect business-critical applications such as e-commerce platforms. Therefore, DRaaS is an easy-to-implement solution that mitigates this risk and ensures businesses have the expert help they need to manage their DR processes.