Priscila Galvao, a MySQL Solutions Engineer, presented on disaster recovery options for MySQL data. The presentation discussed how backup is the first step but not sufficient on its own for protection against disasters. It introduced disaster recovery plans and options like cloud backup and disaster recovery to Oracle Cloud's MySQL service in active-standby or active-active configurations. Benefits highlighted included conserving resources, faster response times, flexibility, security, and support.
Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening everyone!
First of all, I would like to thank you for joining our Webinar: “Robust, Easy, Affordable Disaster Recovery for MySQL Data”.
Before we start, let’s take a minute to read our Safe Harbor Statement that states that this presentation is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality.”
My name is Priscila Galvao, I’m a MySQL Solutions Engineer located in Seattle, WA; and, I’ll be your presenter today.
Please, during the presentation, feel free to ask questions through the chat windows where I’ll have my coworker Kathy Forte answering you. Thanks, Kathy!
Losing data in your business can come in more than one form and level of severity. Some can be small and easily fixable and others can be more severe and take weeks to repair. Data loss needs to be taken seriously since businesses and economy are increasingly becoming more dependent upon its collection and safe storage.
There are levels of risk that range from minor to significant.
An example of minor risk is when only one work station loses files and several hours of employee production while files have been backed up successfully. A customer history would be considered minor if lost as long as hard copies exist, though time to be re-entered can add to cost.
A Moderate risk is when a database such as Customer Relationship Management or comparable has a crash without successfully being backed up. A reduction in the productivity of more than one worker is lessened and revenue is lost until data is restored, possibly for days.
And, a Significant risk is Often after natural disasters or other occurrences causing days of power outages. Close to 20% of data is not found, with a failed backup or only some files being backed up. A computer code being lost is significant, because it must be rewritten. Companies have to pay for high skilled software developers that have large fees and can take some time.
Reduction in profit because of data loss can manifest itself in several forms:
First, Loss of Revenue, when a customer cannot be contacted because their information has been wiped out of the CRM.
Second, Productivity, if your employee has a hard drive crash, this hinders their ability to produce until it is fixed.
Third, Reputation, If you cannot retrieve information for a customer because of a data loss, your business’s character can suffer.
And, forth, Time, It can take a lot of time to restore data or even re-create it, such as the lost computer code in a significant case. Hard drives may crash and have to be sent out to specialists that restore them.
On the average, the most common types of data loss can take six hours to recover, costing roughly $170 to pay an employee. If the company does not employ a specialist in recovery of data, the company must go outside and spend more money. Often outside specialists cost 2 to 3 times more than an in house worker.
If data is lost and cannot be retrieved, depending on the size of the company, costs can be estimated to be much more. When it can be keyed in again in a small amount of time, the cost will be minimal. The other side of that coin represents loss equating to weeks and hundreds of hours to restore with costs ranging from thousands to millions of dollars.
So, what is a Disaster and Recovery?
Disaster recovery or DR is about preparing for and recovering from a disaster. Any event that has a negative impact on
a company’s business continuity or finances could be termed a disaster.
This includes hardware or software failure, a network outage, a power outage, physical damage to a building like fire or flooding, human error, or some other significant event.
When a business suffers a disaster, one of the most long-lasting, detrimental effects comes in the form of downtime, or a loss of business operations and profits. A lack of disaster recovery planning can result in a chain of events that turns a minor event into a data breach and resultant catastrophic business disaster.
Many small and medium-sized businesses simply don’t have the disaster recovery planning in place to survive even a partial loss of data and IT functionality for a short time, much less the related fall-out and loss of revenue that results from a full-blown data breach.
Business owners often make the mistake of assuming that backing up their data is enough to keep them up-and-running post-disaster. Unfortunately, simply having a backup is only one part of the equation
Similar to having a flat tire and a spare, but no tools to get that spare into place to keep your car moving forward.
When you’re stuck by the side of the road, time is of the essence. How fast can you change your tire (your Recovery Time Objective, or RTO)? At what point can you continue making the same progress as before the incident occurred? (your Recovery Point Objective, or RPO)? Just like a stand-alone backup plan, some spare tires are only good for certain distances at lower speeds and only as a stopgap measure to get you to the repair shop. Other spares are designed to be used over a longer term, with full driving capabilities—but operating with them can sometimes compromise other parts of the automobile, such as tire treadwear, fuel efficiency, and braking power.
Certain variables will come into play the moment disaster strikes—and how you and your business respond will ultimately determine how fast you get your business operations back up-and-running post-disaster.
What is Backup?
To put it simply, backup is the copying of files to another location, usually on a disk and located either on-site, off-site, or both. Ideally, backups will occupy three separate locations: onsite, offsite, and in the cloud. Backups are put into service in an on-call fashion, and utilized only when necessary.
When is backup enough?
As long as your IT environment itself isn’t affected, a loss of data can sometimes be managed with backup alone. The backup function allows you to bring your data back into your systems to get your IT functionality back on track. However, in the event of a disaster—whether natural or during a cyberattack—the typical IT environment is compromised along with the data, making a data replacement or backup virtually useless without a disaster recovery plan in place.
Don’t be misled by the idea that data backup is a sufficient precaution in the event of a cybersecurity disaster.
So, When is backup NOT enough?
As soon as your IT environment becomes compromised, your data backup becomes that spare tire—without the required lug nuts, jacks, and know-how to put it into service. Having your data backed up in a compromised IT environment is akin to not having a backup at all.
In short, backup is just the beginning. To ensure business continuity and an IT environment that stays up-and-running in the event of a disaster, you must establish a proper disaster response plan.
Disaster recovery comes into play when your business’s operations and continuing functionality are on the line. A solid disaster recovery plan involves a complete imaging and mirroring of your disk drives and servers to allow a rapid restore of your entire system—this method is faster and more efficient than manually restoring your operating system and copying/transferring filesIt’s important to keep in mind that a disaster doesn’t necessarily mean a catastrophic hurricane, and it doesn’t typically involve the physical damage we associate with natural disasters in general. For most businesses, disaster strikes when IT networks and systems go down for any length of time that affects normal business operations. When you have a reputable disaster recovery plan in place, your employees can continue to work and you can continue to serve your customers by relying on your mirrored system.
To effectively implement a disaster recovery strategy, you’ll need to consider your offsite backup storage options. The most reliable and cost-effective offsite storage location is the cloud-hosted option, which stores your valuable company data and files in a location away from your physical location and separately from your servers. Cloud hosted backup allows for a mirroring of your entire system, which translates to faster recovery time—and no need to wait for the copy and transfer of data involved with a manual backup/restore method.
Oracle Public Cloud provides various options for you to implement your disaster recovery plan depends on your recovery point objective and recovery time objective to prevent revenue loss, productivity loss, reputation loss, and time loss.
The different disaster recovery options allow different recovery time and associated cost. The chart below shows the cost and recovery time relative to each option.
In most traditional environments, enterprises backup their databases to disk or tape and send the backups to an offsite location for storage. When disaster strikes, enterprises take the backup from the offsite location and restore the backup to a different site or to the original site after it is re-built. This usually takes days if not months to restore business back to normal in the event of a disruption or disaster.
Oracle Storage Cloud Service is an ideal destination for backup data that might be needed quickly to perform a restore. Transferring data to and from Oracle Storage Cloud Service is typically done through the network, and is therefore accessible from any location.
This allows enterprises to shorten the time to transfer the backups between their data center and Oracle Storage Cloud, ensure shorten the time for transferring data back and forth, replicate and you also have the option to restore your database into MySQL Cloud Service.
There are multiple ways to back up your MySQL databases. And, we will discuss using MySQL Enterprise Backup and mysqldump programs to back up your MySQL databases to Oracle Storage Cloud Service.
MySQL Enterprise Backup comes with MySQL Enterprise Edition, and it performs physical backups. With MySQL Enterprise Backup, you have the option to back up your MySQL databases to Oracle Storage Cloud directly by simply using the commands we see here.
Also, you could use the Mysqldump, that is a client utility that performs logical backups. The backup files generated by MySQLdump can be transfer to Oracle Storage Cloud.
Of course, backup of your data is only half of the story. If disaster strikes, you’ll need to recover your data quickly and reliably.
You should ensure that your systems are configured to retain and secure your data, and you should test your data recovery processes.
The following diagram shows how you can quickly restore a system from Oracle Storage Cloud Service to a MySQL Cloud Service.
Or, you could, also, restore your backup to your on-premise servers using MySQL Enterprise Backup or mysqldump.
The term standby is used to describe a Disaster Recovery scenario in which a scaled down version of a fully functional environment is always running in the cloud.
A standby solution extends the pilot light elements and preparation. It further decreases the recovery time because some services are always running. By identifying your business critical systems, you can fully duplicate these systems on Oracle Public Cloud and have them always on.
These servers can be running on a minimum sized fleet of MySQL instances on the smallest sizes possible. This solution is not scaled to take a full production load, but it is fully functional. It can be used for non-production work, such as testing, quality assurance, and internal use.
In a disaster, the system is scaled up quickly to handle the production load. In Oracle Public Cloud, this can be done by adding more instances and by resizing the small capacity servers to run on larger types.
And a big advantage from other cloud providers is, that you will be running the exactly same MySQL version on premise and the cloud, and you can use MySQL Replication to replicate from on-premise to the cloud.
And, also, Oracle is the only Public Cloud vendor who provides MySQL database integrated with MySQL Enterprise Edition.
A multi-site solution runs in Oracle Public Cloud as well as on your existing on-site infrastructure, in an active-active configuration. The data replication method that you employ will be determined by the recovery point that you choose.
In addition to recovery point options, there are various replication methods, such as synchronous and asynchronous methods.
You can use a DNS service that supports weighted routing, to route production traffic to different sites that deliver the same application or service. A proportion of traffic will go to your infrastructure in Oracle Public Cloud, and the remainder will go to your on-site infrastructure.
In an on-site disaster situation, you can adjust the DNS weighting and send all traffic to the Oracle Cloud servers.
There are some benefits of Using Oracle Public Cloud for Disaster Recovery.
Organizations using the cloud for disaster recovery don't have to go to the expense of setting up a duplicate data center — not to mention, one that sits idle most of the time, waiting for a disaster.
Using Oracle Public Cloud also means that organizations can respond more quickly to a disaster, sometimes in as little as a matter of minutes. In fact, companies can actually recover from a disaster within the cloud itself, using cloud orchestration and automation tools to automate the in-cloud recovery process from end to end or restoring to a MySQL Cloud instance.
Finally, organizations that choose the cloud for their disaster recovery solution don't have to pick a location for a disaster recovery facility and cross their fingers hoping that it, too, doesn't end up stricken by a disaster. Moreover, because of the way the cloud works, a company needs to reserve — and pay for — only the amount of data it needs and is actively using. Business units can decide exactly which data is the most critical to recover, reducing costs just at the time when the organization most needs economy.
All that said, even with the cloud, an organization can't just set up a disaster recovery plan and walk away. Disaster recovery plans should be tested at least every year, and quarterly is even better, warns IDC, adding that products that can simulate tests and do pretest checks are particularly helpful.
Fast Performance
Fast disk-based storage and retrieval of files.
No Tape
Eliminate costs associated with transporting, storing, and retrieving tape media and associated tape backup software.
Elasticity
Add any amount of data, quickly. Easily expire and delete without handling media.
Secure
Secure and durable cloud disaster recovery platform with industry-recognized certifications and audits.
Now, that we know of many reasons to use Oracle Public Cloud to set up your Disaster Recovery, let’s learn more about the MySQL Cloud Service on Oracle Public Cloud.
Oracle Cloud is secure by default, where you have MySQL Cloud Service’s access governed by access rules.
But, With MySQL Enterprise Edition security features such as Enterprise Firewall, Enterprise Authentication, Enterprise Encryption, Transparent Data Encryption, and Enterprise Audit, MySQL Cloud Service provides additional layers of security to help organizations protect their data at rest and in transit.
Security is about managing risks, so nothing can ever be considered completely secure. However for most nonprofits, reputable cloud providers tend to provide better security than your current arrangement, as they have significantly more resources to dedicate to this area.
MySQL Cloud Service is able to bring your own IP addresses to the cloud by Setting up subnets the way you want.
One of the reasons organizations are moving to the cloud is the elasticity and scalability that cloud offers. With MySQL Cloud Service, not only do we provide elastic compute and storage capabilities, we also allow customers to scale using our unique MySQL Enterprise Thread Pool.
We will also support elastic replication that automates adding or removing MySQL replicas in future release.
MySQL Oracle Premier Support are included with MySQL Cloud Service at no extra cost.
MySQL technical support is provided directly by the experts, backed by the engineers that develop MySQL solutions. They help customers to solve most complex issues and help them make the most of their MySQL deployments. We write the MySQL code – we know how it works! The support is not only for product issues but also includes consultative support with a team of engineers to help you with design and performance advice.
Additionally, this gives you an one-stop support solution for both cloud infrastructure and MySQL. You can count with Oracle Premier Support to support your Cloud infrastructure, Oracle Linux, and any MySQL related issues that you may have.
Now, let’s take a quick look into the MySQL Cloud Service’s Tools.
One example, is the MySQL Enterprise Backup GUI, where you can easily backup your MySQL Cloud instances by a click of a button. As, we can see here, we only need to click on “Back up Now”.
Also, you have the ability to use MySQL Enterprise Monitor to monitor your on-Premise and on-Cloud MySQL Databases. You will only need to click on “Enterprise Monitor URL”.
MySQL Enterprise Monitor, is part of the MySQL Enterprise Edition and is also available through the MySQL Cloud Service. It provides real-time visibility into the performance and availability of all your MySQL databases.
On MySQL Enterprise Monitor, you can see for example: how many connections your MySQL instances are handling or can see what your current emergency and critical events are; so, you can work to solve the problems on your server.
Also, MySQL Enterprise Monitor, can notifies you in case your backups are out of date, or if the firewall catched any attacks to your databases.
And, these are only some examples, of the MySQL Enterprise Monitor’s functionality.
Also, on Oracle Public Cloud you can see the history of all your service instances by utilizing the Activity tab.
And, an exclusive Oracle Cloud’s Feature is the ability to use SSH Access to log into your MySQL Cloud Service Instance and have a MySQL root access where you can full control and tune your MySQL Database.
So, today, we discussed how you can rapidly, securely, and cost-effectively implement your MySQL’s disaster recovery plan on Oracle Public Cloud.
And if you want to try out our MySQL in Oracle Cloud, please visit cloud.oracle.com/mysql.
For more information, please visit our home page: cloud.oracle.com/mysql or our documentation website posted here.
We will be available for 10 more minutes to answer any questions you may have. Or, you may send your inquire through e-mail to myself or Kathy Forte.
Thank you once again for joining our webinar today and have a great rest of your day.