A large number of Oracle customers use Oracle Data Guard to implement high availability, data protection and disaster recovery (DR) for their business critical Oracle databases. The creation of an Oracle physical standby database at the DR site can be a time-consuming activity, particularly if the database size is huge and the network bandwidth is not so great. That is because the primary database needs to be backed up and the backup needs to be transferred to the Standby site.
In this article, we'll learn how we can leverage Purity Snapshots to quickly build a physical standby database at the DR site, instead of a time-consuming RMAN restore. As the snapshots are deduped and compressed, the time that it takes to transfer them to the remote FlashArray™ is significantly reduced. Since snapshot replication on a FlashArray is incremental, the initial replication of the volume snapshots that transfers bulk of the data can be done ahead of time.
Please note that we are using snapshots only for the initial creation of the physical standby database. Subsequent transfer of data to keep the primary and the standby database in sync happens through the standard Data Guard Redo Transport services.
However, if the standby database was to ever get out of sync, we can quickly redo the snapshot replication and volume overwrite process to build a new copy again. In this case, the overwrite option in the Copy snapshot to volumes step needs to be enabled.