Disaster recovery

The DCT appliance provides two ways to recover the appliance and its application data — accounts, access groups, engine and orchestrator registrations, dSource and VDB metadata, compliance configurations, bookmarks, and operation history — if the appliance is lost. Both achieve the same outcome; they differ in how much is automated and, as a result, in the recovery times you can achieve.

  • Backup and restore (manual). Take point-in-time backups of the appliance and restore them to the same or a different appliance when needed. This is a manual process, available on all DCT license tiers.

  • Automated disaster recovery (DCT Enterprise). Replicate the appliance to a standby appliance that you can promote to take over if the primary is lost. Because the standby is kept in sync and failover is largely automated, this option achieves a lower recovery time and lower potential data loss than the manual process. Automated disaster recovery requires a DCT Enterprise license, and is available only on the DCT appliance.

Choosing an approach

Use the comparison below to choose the approach that fits your recovery objectives and license tier. Many organizations use both: backups for portable, point-in-time recovery points, and automated disaster recovery for fast failover.

These options protect the DCT appliance's own data, not the datasets on your engines. If you use Continuous Data, the recovery of your virtualized datasets continues to come from Delphix engine replication, as before. If you use Continuous Compliance, the compliance configuration that historically lived on the engine is now stored in DCT's database, so protecting the DCT appliance also protects that configuration.

Automated disaster recovery is available only on the DCT appliance. For DCT deployed on Kubernetes or OpenShift, use the backup, recovery, and migration process together with your platform's standard Kubernetes disaster recovery approaches.

Backup and restore (manual)

Automated disaster recovery

License tier

All tiers (DCT Core and above).

DCT Enterprise.

How it works

You take point-in-time backups (on a schedule you define) and restore them manually when needed.

A standby appliance replicates the primary and can be promoted to take over.

Recovery effort

Manual restore, and for a hardware loss, provisioning and configuring a replacement appliance first.

Largely automated: the standby is already running and is promoted to primary.

Recovery time and potential data loss

Higher. Recovery point is the last backup; recovery time includes the manual restore.

Lower. Ongoing replication keeps the standby close to current, and failover is fast — supporting more demanding service-level objectives.

Best for

Portability across appliances, cross-version restores, and recovering from user error or migration.

Production deployments that need fast failover and minimal data loss.

For license tier details, see Licensing.

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