City Pharmacy achieves 10 minute RPO with Standby

Their situation

City Pharmacy Co. is a leading distributor of pharmaceuticals, dental products, laboratory supplies and medical equipment in the United Arab Emirates. They have over 750 staff and a wide range of customers including private and government hospitals.

City Pharmacy’s critical operations are run on their Orion ERP with an Oracle Standard Edition database. This system has over 180 active users at ten sites across the UAE, including warehouses, offices and retail showrooms.

Due to their growth; the nightly off-site backup’s and cold off-site standby server no longer delivered the performance required. The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) was up to 24hrs and the highly manual recovery process had a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 24 hours. This amount of data loss was unacceptable and a new solution was needed. There was also a preference that City Pharmacy continued to use Oracle Standard Edition.

Overview

Solution:

Standby™ was quickly implemented on an existing offsite server
City Pharmacy are able to easily manage the standby database and run DR tests to ensure they are ready to successfully failover at any time

Results:

A PoC was implemented within one day that proved Standby™’s speed, data integrity and failover capabilities.
RTO of 30 minutes
RPO of 10 minutes

How we helped the client

Information Dynamics, a leading software, product and service provider in the UAE designed a cost-effective disaster recovery solution for the Oracle SE database utilising Standby™.

A Proof of Concept (PoC) was established within a day by Information Dynamics and City Pharmacy. Standby™ ’s ease of configuration, speed and efficiency, and failover performance gave them the confidence to quickly move to implementation. Head of IT at City Pharmacy, Vijay Chandnani, says “We really liked the interface and were quickly able to set up and test data replication, including the recovery of a small database”.

The implementation was straightforward. City Pharmacy chose to use the existing “cold standby” server at their remote site to host their new standby database. Within hours of Standby™’s installation, the standby server was both up to date and the databases fully synchronized.

Dbvisit delivers what we expected. It provides a simple user interface and highly automated processes for setting up and managing replicated Oracle Standard Edition databases

Vijay Chandnani Head of IT City Pharmacy

The positive outcome

Using Standby™, City Pharmacy was able to continue using Oracle Standard Edition while implementing best practice DR with near real-time data replication for disaster recovery.

The new DR solution provides an RPO of 10 minutes and an RTO of 30 minutes on a database with 730GB of data and daily replication transfers of up to 200MB.

City Pharmacy are able to effectively manage and test the disaster recovery solution through the simple user interface. While they have not had the need to recover from a real failure, their regular DR testing means they are ready to successfully failover anytime. Vijay Chandnani says “Dbvisit delivers what we expected. It provides a simple user interface and highly automated processes for setting up and managing replicated Oracle Standard Edition databases”.

Tags: Case Study, Oracle SE, Healthcare, Easy DR Testing, Easy manageability, Fast implementation, ERP

RPO of 10 minutes

In summary

City Pharmacy urgently needed to improve their combined RPO and RTO time of 48 hours while preferably remaining on Oracle Standard Edition.

A PoC was implemented within one day that proved Standby™’s speed, data integrity and failover capabilities.

Standby™ was quickly implemented on an existing offsite server and delivers a fast recovery (RTO) of 30 minutes and minimal data loss (RPO) of 10 minutes

City Pharmacy are able to easily manage the standby database and run DR tests to ensure they are ready to successfully failover at any time.