Druva Direct-to-Cloud Support for RAC

Druva has had an excellent RAC (real application cluster) backup capability for some time. In recent history, our intelligent agent-based RAC backup has had significant feature-rich functionalities added. A recent blog delves into how our agent is capable of superlative discovery to identify and discover Oracle container databases as well as their attendant pluggable databases. The Druva Direct-to-Cloud (DTC) agent first performs a shallow discovery before completing a deep discovery. These layers of discovery are more granular than most backup and recovery agents and are greatly beneficial for Oracle DBAs looking to enhance their infrastructure protection. 

In my recent blog post, I discussed deploying an Oracle 21c database stand-alone in my lab. I used the default or typical installation menu from the Oracle database configuration assistant. Much to my surprise, it deployed a stand-alone database with a container and pluggable database out of the box! Oracle is very careful to give its end-user community a fairly clear indication of where it is headed technologically by simply adding these new features to the DBCA. Previously, you had a choice to either add a container and pluggable database on the configuration of the database — now that is simply the default!

Watch a demo of Druva’s Oracle DTC support below:

Druva’s DTC Database Support

An ideal data protection solution must have the ability to work seamlessly with any type of database, stand-alone, RAC, container, pluggable, or otherwise. Druva’s intelligent Oracle Direct-to-Cloud agent discovers any type of database with ease and certainty! Have a look at the following screenshot for an example:

In the screenshot, we see the clear-cut capture of the CDB by our Druva DTC agent with a variety of other granular discovery aspects, like the database version, type of authentication, and even the archivelog mode. The next element of discovery that I wish to highlight is the pluggable database.

Druva Pluggable Database Support

This granular information is exactly what Oracle database administrators are seeking in their data protection products. It is important to note that Druva also offers Oracle DTC for use in AWS EC2, a myriad of on-premise customer sites, and also in the OCI or Oracle Cloud! I hazard a guess that our Oracle DTC agent will work in Azure as well since we deployed our MS SQL server agent there successfully by extrapolation — as long as the VM runs the Linux OS, like Oracle UEK or Redhat Linux, it is compatible with our agent. This test is next on my list of to-dos for the New Year! 

As customers develop a yen for deploying multi-cloud environments, data protection vendors must also serve that need. As time catapults us forward through 2023, expect to see IT organizations deploy multi-cloud environments and customers demand data to be shared across all public and private Clouds!

The screenshot below provides a quick view of how Druva protects a RAC cluster as well as what mechanisms it uses to authenticate.

Here we see that the entire cluster is discovered, all nodes and their node names are displayed, as well as what node. In this case, node 1 was chosen as the primary node for backup. This allows the DBA, depending on the authentication mechanism chosen, to spread the backup across multiple nodes or just one. I have a 19.0.3 cluster database as well as a 19.14 cluster database in our lab, and our Oracle DTC agent works with both perfectly!

Our agent is even intelligent enough to back up the Oracle wallet, which we will see in our next illustration.

Backing Up and Protecting Oracle Wallet

Visit the “All Jobs” page, select a job by ID, and review the logs for a look at backups of the Oracle Wallet. Wallet, database, and OS authentication are all supported by the Druva Oracle DTC agent. Every file in a RAC cluster is protected, including ASM datafiles, control files, archivelog files, and of course, the server-side parameter files, as well as the Oracle Wallet if one is currently in use.

Another wonderful new feature of Druva’s Oracle DTC is support for Standby and Primary databases — whether they run on an Oracle RAC cluster or, for that matter, stand-alone! This enhancement makes backing up a Data Guard configuration a piece of cake! The DTC agent affords the DBA the ability to back up either the primary database or the standby database, or both! See below:

Key Takeaways

In order to review and conclude, the Druva Oracle DTC agent is real, application cluster ready, capable of backing up a primary and or standby database, and even supports the data protection of container database technology. Authentication mechanisms to affect these backups are as follows: OS Authentication, Database Authentication, and Wallet Authentication. 

The Druva DTC agent is also capable of Oracle Wallet backups such that no element of any one Oracle database is not protected! These powerful data protection capabilities make Druva a hallmark of data protection vendors second to none, and the Druva Oracle DTC agent is a superior product capable of even protecting your multi-cloud environments!

Visit Druva’s Oracle page to further explore how your IT team can improve Oracle data protection with cloud backup-as-a-service, and download the DBA’s guide to Oracle data protection for a comprehensive look at best practices.