Generally, there are two types of recovery restorations. A production restore is a rollback in time which takes place in the protected volumes on the production server. The other type of restore, a virtual restore, is a rollback in time which is executed over a read-writable virtual image of the protected volumes which reside on the recovery server.
For a production restore, Assure MIMIX DR for AIX must have exclusive I/O access to the protected volumes. The application must be stopped, and the file systems must be unmounted. Assure MIMIX DR for AIX is the only process that should be allowed to write into the protected volumes during a production restore. The control over the protected volumes and the information stored by the Assure MIMIX DR for AIX process allow an undo of data corruption faster than the corruption occurred.
Production restores are useful for a database “crash” where the database will not come up. By recovering an image of the actual production database to some point in the past directly on the production disk itself, Assure MIMIX DR for AIX can rollback a crashed database in minutes rather than hours or days for the most disastrous operational situation a database can encounter.
In contrast, a virtual restore is useful for database repair. In this case, an image of the database is rolled back to some point in the past on the snapshot which resides on the recovery server. Select pieces of the data can then be extracted and copied into the production database.
Related Topics: