Disaster Recovery Support

To satisfy the requirement of disaster recovery, Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud provides self-service options to restore your environments to a working state, thereby achieving near immediate Recovery Time Objective. To learn more about the self-service option of automatically keeping your Disaster Recovery environments up to date, refer to "Replicating an EPM Cloud Environment" in Working with EPM Automate for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud.

Questions and Answers

• How are backups performed?

  A snapshot is taken each day at a scheduled maintenance time. See these information sources:

  • For Services other than Narrative Reporting: Overview of the Maintenance Snapshot
  • For Narrative Reporting only: "Performing Backup and Restore (System Clone)" in Administering Narrative Reporting.

  It is your sole responsibility to maintain appropriate security, protection and backup of content. Oracle highly recommends that the snapshot be copied to a local machine as a secondary backup. The snapshot in an environment is overwritten each day. In order to maintain history, a copy must be captured locally. Automated snapshot backup can be executed by using a Windows or Linux batch script. See "Back up Application Snapshot to a Computer" in Working with EPM Automate for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud for a sample script. Oracle may assist customers to otherwise restore the application. For more information, see "Requesting an Old Backup Snapshot of an Environment" in the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud Operations Guide.

• Where is the snapshot stored?

  Snapshots are stored in the same environment for three days, after which the snapshots from production environments are archived offsite. Oracle does not archive snapshots from test environments. You can store and archive snapshots as you choose. The snapshot that is visible to the customer is always the snapshot taken during the last maintenance.

• How quickly can a backup be restored?

  Snapshot restoration is on a best effort basis; restoration times depend on the type of the catastrophe.

• After a catastrophe that destroys the environment, what should customer expectations be for restoration of the application?

  This information is covered in the SaaS Hosting and Delivery Pillar document. Snapshot restoration is on a best effort basis.

• Is a separate environment required to implement a disaster recovery plan?

  Yes. The recovered environment will reflect the last snapshot available in the environment. Changes made after the creation of the last maintenance snapshot are lost.

• If a customer purchases a separate environment, can that environment be a mirror so that no loss of data occurs at any time?

  You can create an EPM Automate script to copy the snapshot from the primary environment to a separate secondary environment each day. You can almost instantly move users to the secondary environment if you already have identical users with appropriate role assignments in the secondary environment. The data available will reflect the last import to the secondary environment. If the last import was the daily maintenance snapshot, it can be up to 24 hours old unless more frequent snapshots are being taken and imported into the secondary environment.

• Can the environment be accessed when a snapshot is being taken during the maintenance process?

  No. Users are not allowed to access the environment when maintenance is in progress. A cold backup is taken during the daily maintenance of the environment.

• Can a hot backups be initiated?

  You can back up an environment whenever you want. Unscheduled snapshots you create are taken as hot backups.