Case Study

Métropole Nice Côte d'Azur - Gold Standard Disaster Recovery for regional administration and public sector.

Following an independent business continuity audit, StandbyMP was chosen for Disaster Recovery against Dataguard, other scripted solutions, and logical replication. In particular, the StandbyMP with Oracle SE provided a 600% saving compared to Enterprise Edition and Data Guard.

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The situation

Created in December 2011, Métropole Nice Côte d'Azur is an intercommunal structure, centred on the city of Nice, France. Today, in 2023, its population has grown to over 948,000 of which 350,000 are located in Nice.

As part of its ongoing process improvement, Métropole Nice Côte d'Azur commissioned an independent audit of its Disaster Recovery (DR) processes. As a result of the audit, Standby was chosen against Dataguard, other scripted solutions and logical replication as the DR solution of choice.

“We have approximately 120 databases of varying sizes. These supported a range of services that are critical for the residents of the Nice Métropole, including critical data sets such as housing, voting and even COVID vaccination data. To ensure the protection of this data and the continuity of our critical services we required a significantly more robust solution,” explained Patrick Giudicelli, Architecte Bases de Données, Databases Architect for Metropole Nice Cote D'Azur.

At the time of the audit, the existing protocols required a single backup each day. This created a lengthy RTO, which could result in the potential exposure of up to half a day's data. Métropole Nice's were looking to greatly reduce their RPO/RTO.

Solution:

StandbyMP delivers Enterprise-class Disaster Recovery on Oracle Standard Edition without the need to move over to Enterprise Edition
Simple installation and setup, requiring just a fraction of DBA time and reduces organizational complexity across their 120 databases
Complements Hyperconverged Nutanix Servers infrastructures
Gold Standard DR

Results:

Met the business continuity RPO and RTO targets
Avoided an approx 600% license cost increase associated with upgrading to Enterprise Edition
Enabled best practice DR processes to be implemented, including DR testing and Graceful Switchovers
Provides a pathway to enable multi-platform support for other database types as the business evolves, SQL Server and PostgreSQL

The solution

Métropole Nice's private cloud Infrastructure is Oracle SE hosted on Hyperconverged Nutanix Servers - This approach combines servers and storage into a distributed infrastructure platform with intelligent software to replace legacy infrastructure consisting of separate servers, storage networks, and storage arrays. The addition of StandbyMP to the stack provides a cost-effective way to deliver warm standby environments, that far outperform the incumbent backup services provided by Nutanix. This not only enables the desired RPO/RTO but does so without the cost associated with upgrading to Oracle EE.

Golden Gate and Data Guard were evaluated as reliable physical data replication solutions however, they were quickly ruled out due to price and complexity. Data Guard required an Oracle Enterprise license, potentially increasing the overall cost of the Oracle licenses by almost 600%. Other third-party solutions such as Quest Shareplex were also evaluated but ruled out based on functionality and cost.

"StandbyMP was able to meet all of our RTO/RPO requirements and delivers all the functionality that we needed at a fraction of the cost of the other solutions evaluated." Patrick Giudicelli.

The reliability and simplicity of StandbyMP provide ease of configuration, speed and efficiency, and failover performance.

The implementation was straightforward. StandbyMP offers an intuitive user interface via the CLI and GUI enabling the effortless creation of standby databases and the ability to perform one-click failovers.

The Future

"We are now in the process of transitioning some of our Database to SQL Server and PostgreSQL. The multiplatform architecture of StandbyMP means that we will have the option of delivering the same level of protection to these platforms as Dbvisit's developers make new databases available. This is an intriguing prospect and it is reassuring to see the product growing with our business."

Patrick Giudicelli. Architecte Bases de Données, Databases Architect for Metropole Nice Cote D'Azur.

Working Smarter Not Harder

In Métropole Nice Côte d'Azur we guarantee that our DBAs would be in the office all the time and so features such as automatic failovers are very valuable.

"The simplicity of a solution like StandbyMP means that I am able to remotely coach less specialised team members to perform key tasks should the need arise. We can let others leverage the tool, train new users and give them procedures to follow.” Patrick Giudicelli.

StandbyMP has been a very powerful tool for Métropole Nice Côte d'Azur giving confidence to failover knowing that their data is protected. During a recent election cycle, for example, they chose to proactively perform a graceful switchover as the production server was running slower than the standby. With StandbyMP this was a simple and stress-free process that they were able to perform with literally just a few clicks.

Tags: SQL Server

Delivering RPO/RTO of 120 minutes

In Summary

Local and regional councils, metropoles and government bodies work with large volumes of critical data, often under tight regulatory guidelines and governance.

StandbyMP delivers an easy-to-implement best-practice DR solution for highly active and business-critical Oracle SE instances.

With more pressure on DBAs to do more with less, StandbyMP allowed Métropole Nice Côte d'Azur to streamline database management for their DBA, and provide Gold Standard DR without the complexity or cost of moving to Enterprise Edition.