10012026 - TechTalk Recap - Oracle Resiliency—Choosing the Right Data Protection Approach🛡️
If you missed our latest TechTalks session, Lester Wells and I explored an important reality for Oracle teams: there is no single data-protection feature that covers every failure scenario. Keeping Oracle resilient means looking beyond a simple “backup or HA” decision. The right approach layers protection for local failures, site failures, operational recovery, and logical corruption—then aligns each layer to the application’s business requirements. What you missed 👇 🧭 HA and DR are different problems. High availability helps applications continue through infrastructure failures; disaster recovery protects against a broader site-level event. Both matter, but not every database needs the same RPO or RTO. ⚡ Snapshots improve operational recovery. Fast, space-efficient snapshots can help reduce backup and recovery pressure, refresh dev/test environments, support reporting copies, and provide recovery points for ransomware or user errors. 🏢 ActiveCluster is designed for continuous availability. For metro-distance deployments that meet latency requirements, synchronous replication can provide zero RPO and zero RTO protection against array or site failure. 🌍 ActiveDR extends protection across distance. Continuous, asynchronous replication supports disaster recovery where synchronous replication is not practical—and enables non-disruptive DR testing. 🧩 Layered protection covers more failure modes. Oracle RAC, ActiveCluster, ActiveDR, Data Guard, Flashback, and snapshots each address different risks. Combining the right layers helps protect both availability and recoverability. 🔎 Replication does not replace logical recovery. A bad write, accidental delete, or corruption can replicate correctly. Point-in-time snapshots and database-level recovery tools remain important parts of the plan. One of the best practical examples was using ActiveDR to bring up and validate a DR environment without disrupting production. That makes it easier to test your recovery plan more often—before you need it. 🎥 Catch up on the session HERE🎥 💬 Which Oracle resilience challenge is top of mind for your team: backup windows, recovery time, site-level availability, DR testing, or protection from logical errors? Share your perspective in the comments.
Using FlashArray Volume Snapshots with Microsoft SQL Server
FlashArray volume snapshots are an amazing tool for any DBA/DBRE managing SQL Server. You can use them to: Instantly recover from user errors or ransomware attacks Create rapid dev/test copies without full restores Offload CHECKDB to another host to avoid production performance hits Refresh reporting environments on demand Seed Always On availability groups faster, without large full backups Enable point-in-time recovery when paired with SQL log backups And the best part? Snapshots on FlashArray are: Immutable Space-efficient Fast to create and restore Fully automatable through the REST API or SDK tools! I worked very closely with our SQL Server field super stars (Anthony Nocentino, Andrew Pruski and Andrew Yun) on a white paper going VERY deep into the architecture and how to. It includes everything from crash- vs. application-consistent snapshots, to step-by-step restore and cloning procedures, to using SQL Server 2022’s new T-SQL snapshot backup. Did we miss anything ? Let us know!New SQL Server with Pure Storage Reference Architecture!
We have a new SQL Server with Pure Storage Reference Architecture! It’s been out for a few months, but this is a great start to your journey to a simpler, high-performance database environment! This reference architecture shows how to: Consolidate transactional and analytical SQL Server workloads using FlashArray Use FlashBlade for rapid, parallel T-SQL backups to file or object storage Enable zero-downtime operations with ActiveCluster and near-synchronous replication via ActiveDR With this RA you will find detailed technical guidance for storage provisioning for SQL Server databases on Windows or Linux as well as best practice guidence on how to take the best advantage of the primary storage layer. Check out the full reference architecture here: Optimizing SQL Server Operations and Scale with Pure Storage (PDF) Have feedback, use cases to share, or questions about implementation? Please reach out!
