THE BUSINESS REQUIREMENT:

Organizations require exact replicas (“clones”) of production databases for many reasons, including:

• To develop and test new applications, or enhanced features for existing applications, for both functionality and performance impact;
• To perform regression tests before database or application patches are applied to the production environment;
• To test new releases of applications or components of the underlying infrastructure (including the database itself) before release to production;
• To troubleshoot software bugs and the ‘fixes’ for those bugs;
• To test backup and recovery processes, including those for disaster recovery plans;

Creating a cloning strategy must include ensuring that clone creation will not negatively impact production performance, maintaining the clones over time (that is, applying patches, fixes, etc. so that they continue to perform exactly as the original database environment), and protecting against ‘clone sprawl’ and over-provisioning.

THE BUSINESS LINKS SOLUTION:

Business Links experience extends to technologies from Oracle, EMC and NetApp. These technologies can be used to create clones using either the production database as the source or a backup.   As an example, NetApp’s FlexClone or Oracle’s dNFS CloneDB software can quickly provide multiple production-level database clones without disrupting ongoing operations and in some instances, without requiring additional storage space at the time of creation.

In addition to creating the clones, Business Links consultants will help you develop a clone management and maintenance strategy, including decommissioning clones when they are no longer required.