SharePlex! Dont be Dino dinner

  We all remember the movie that came out years ago about a dinosaur theme park where you could see living dinosaurs on an island. Everything worked great until the “bad” guys stepped in and crashed everything causing havoc and of letting the dinos out their cages to run freely eating everything AND everyone in their path.

          Well, as I was watching that movie the other night I started thinking, where was their disaster recovery plan? They all sat there trying to bring the production systems all back online after being locked out, and of course, they didn’t know who did it. This cost them time and their lives in some cases until finally, they were able to get their production systems back up.

I couldn’t help but think that if they had been using SharePlex they may have prevented themselves from becoming raptor food. You see SharePlex allows you to have a disaster recovery database in sync with your production database so that if the need ever came up you can move to your DR environment and be up and running in a very short period. Disaster Recovery is only one of the many use cases that you can use SharePlex for. As the picture below shows, the use cases are broken into three main buckets: Availability, Scalability and Integration. By mixing and matching these use cases you can cover almost any scenario that may come up giving you the flexibility to replicate your data where and as you need.

You See, SharePlex is a logical near real-time data replication solution that is easy to setup and use. In today's world, your data must be agile and available whenever and wherever it’s needed. What if you had the knowledge knowing that in case of a disaster you were already covered and your disaster recover database was in sync and ready for use. What if you could stop those pesky 1:00 am calls that your production database was running slow due to reports being run. What if you needed to know who had made an unauthorized change to data? I know if I were running SharePlex I would sleep better.

So, let’s get back to our movie, only this time lets see how it would have worked out if they had been running SharePlex in their system.

“OH NO!! we’ve lost control of our production environment and have been locked out. The dinosaur cages are all opening”. Thinking quickly our hero’s next comments would have been, “Quick, bring up the DR site, it’s always kept in sync with production because we have SharePlex replicating the data.” Once the DR environment has taken over as production, the systems all come back online, and the T-Rex never had the chance to get out and enjoy a free lunch of Homo Sapiens. Finally, our hero logs into the database and looking at the audit records SharePlex has been creating he sees, of all things, it’s the computer network engineer who is responsible for locking the system and creating the havoc. He is quickly arrested, and the theme park opens and is a great success.

Well that would have made for a boring movie and would not have been the success it was, but if it were real life that’s what we would want. As a DBA we like boring. We have enough stress as it is and the great thing about SharePlex is that it helps take some of the stress away and lets us sleep at night.

So, until the next blockbuster movie of a failed Disaster Recovery process comes out, I bid you farewell…Don’t become a Dino happy meal

For more information on Data Replication visit shareplex.com