Add geo-redundancy to your disaster recovery plan with multiple Cross-Region DR Peers in Autonomous Database

In today’s heavily online global economy, it is ever more important for businesses to strive for a well-planned disaster recovery solution to minimize downtime and data loss, and maximize recovery. Many businesses today already have compliance requirements - either from your customers or governments - To keep your data and operations in more than one or two physical locations. To achieve such geo-redundancy, Oracle Autonomous Database just released the ability for users to enable multiple cross-region Disaster Recovery (DR) standby peers. ADB now allows users to create multiple disaster recovery peers, one in every region subscribed in your tenancy.

While this ability can and should be used by all users that have multiple standbys in their well-planned DR strategy, this new feature is especially critical for enterprises running in regions with a single availability domain (AD) - Where a local (same-region) standby cannot take advantage of the physical and network separation that comes with multiple ADs, which protects from the rare, true disasters that could take down whole buildings.

How to add additional Cross-Region Disaster Recovery Peers

Adding additional cross-region DR peers in Oracle Autonomous Database is as simple as before - A few simple clicks. Follow these steps to configure your additional disaster recovery peer:

Step 1: Login and select your Autonomous Database configured with a disaster recovery peer

• Log in to your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) account.
• Navigate to the “Autonomous Database” section under the “Databases” menu.
• Locate and select the primary Autonomous Database for which you have DR enabled, and want to add an additional DR peer.

Step 2: Add an additional Cross-Region peer in a remote region

• On your database console, scroll down and select the “Disaster Recovery” tab. To add a disaster recovery peer, click “Add Peer.”

• In the “Add Peer” popup, select the second remote region where you want to create the additional remote peer.
• Make the additional DR selections - Whether you want this peer to be Autonomous Data Guard (for the quickest RTO) or Backup-Based Disaster Recovery (higher RTO, lower price), as well as whether you need cross-region backup replication. Finish by clicking “Add Peer”.

This process should look familiar, because it is the same, simple process as creating your first DR peer. The peer may take a few minutes to create and become available depending on the size of your database; once available you are now protected in multiple remote regions! You may test your DR standby peer by switching over to it, or converting it to a snapshot standby to validate your data.

For more information about disaster recovery options in ADB, refer to the Oracle Autonomous Database documentation. To automate these options via the API, refer to the API documentation.

Conclusion

This functionality, which provides multiple cross-region peers, adds another important dimension to ADB’s disaster recovery story, making it dead simple for users in all regions to be redundantly protected against major outages.

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