Clonetab is a rapid cloning appliance that can automatically clone (refresh) your Oracle e-Business suite, PeopleSoft and Oracle Databases. Clonetab has robust functionality for – standards based automatic cloning of Oracle e-Business Suite, PeopleSoft and Oracle Databases while providing for Audit Trail, scheduling the tasks, patching, rules based data scrambling to sanitize sensitive data, retaining instance specific information, as well as easy to use ad hoc operational capabilities that the Database Administrators would be looking for. Clonetab will be your virtual DBA team member doing all the end-to-end cloning/refresh, patching, data scrambling tasks per the pre-defined schedule – all this is done at much higher speeds, lower costs and behind the scenes with minimal or no additional human intervention.
DBAs spend considerable amount of time for refreshes of e-Business using rapid clone. Some DBAs even create custom scripts to clone their environments. There are several drawbacks of using scripts for cloning – (a) non-availability of audit trail (b) they hinder the enterprise wide compliance and internal control efforts (c) no provision for role based security (d) no reporting mechanism (e) they are risky as fraud and financial manipulation can be perpetuated by knowing the bank account information or by knowing the financial results prior to public release and so on. Lack of audit trail and lack of segregation of duties could encourage sensitive data leaving the enterprise without proper approvals. The rapidclone cannot be scheduled, which means the DBA has to be physically present to perform the refresh. There are several pre-clone & post-clone tasks that DBA has to manually perform when using rapidclone. Clonetab is much faster, provides standards based automatic clones with audit trail, decrease overall risks in cloning, helps enterprise compliance initiatives and integrates rules as to “need‐to‐know and need‐to‐do”. Refer to the answer under ‘Why should I use Clonetab’ above, for the advantages of using Clonetab.
Clonetab has built-in tracking mechanism as to who carried out what cloning tasks, when and so on, within Clonetab Application. The tracking provides the audit trail which is essential to enforce Compliance regulations and internal control. The role based segregation of duties further helps enforcing internal controls by dividing the roles of individuals within the team and granting access only up to the extent required – provide access to users on a need‐to‐know and need‐to‐do basis. Additionally Clonetab Data Scrambling module offers rules based scrambling mechanism to obfuscate all the sensitive data as soon as the database is copied from source instance to the target instance, which ensures that no sensitive data is leaving your production environment without being sanitized. Clonetab offers several reports which help the Compliance Auditor while performing compliance audits. The built-in alert mechanisms can provide notifications to team members and Compliance Administrator as soon as a cloning/refresh task is scheduled, started, completed or halted due to error.
Clonetab offers built-in protection via a check box in the UI screens at the time of registration of a source instance. Once you check this box while registering source instance, that instance never appears in the target instance list. There is a second protection at the Unix level, for your important volumes, via internal mechanisms where information as to important volumes is written. Clone-engine will check this mechanism before starting the refresh and will halt the process if it encounters an important volume for the given refresh.
Clonetab is built using Java platform. ReactJS is used for the UI (User Interface) and it has got its own Oracle XE database repository (No additional database license is required). Clonetab can be accessed from most of the certified standard browsers like Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Google Chrome and so on.
Clonetab offers the following base modules.
The price depends on the combination of the modules you wish to purchase, subscription duration, number of source/target environments and so on. You can purchase the Base module for Oracle database refresh at the minimum. Please refer to question 7 above for available modules. Please contact our sales team at sales@clonetab.com so that we can generate a formal quote for you.
Currently we are selling Clonetab
(a) under 3-year subscription license model or as
(b) yearly subscription as for use by the end-customers.
You can clone as many instances as you want within your domain using single instance of Clonetab. The license fee also depends on the modules being used, the number of source/target instances being registered in Clonetab UI, the subscription period and so on. The above described licenses cannot be used by companies that service their customer cloning needs, such as consulting companies in whose case our sales teams will work with you on the terms. There would be support fee that need to be paid every year. Clonetab end-user license is not transferable. Please contact our sales team at sales@clonetab.com to know more about our support fee structure. The licensing price, licensing model, the terms of licensing, the terms of support and the support fee may change without notice at any time.
When you refresh your target instance from a source instance, some confidential information that is contained in the source instance gets copied on to the target instance. For example you may copy confidential information such as customer credit card numbers, employee salaries, home phone numbers etc., from your production instance to your development instance. In most of the situations the development team that is working on your customizations need not know this sensitive data. Clontab can automatically scramble this data before releasing the target instance for use by the users.
Clonetab has a role called “Compliance manager” that comes with data scrambling module. A user having this privilege can define a data scrambling rule, that shows which columns of a source instance tables contains sensitive data and which of the given algorithms to use for scrambling that sensitive data, and then apply that rule to a given target instance. Essentially the Clone-engine will, behind the scenes, scramble the defined sensitive data and then only release the target instance for use by the users. This way Clonetab ensures that no confidential data is leaving your source instance without being scrambled. Users of Clonetab who does not have the required privileges cannot change the data scrambling rules nor can they skip the data scrambling sub-task from the clone/refresh task. When you perform clones using manual methods you can’t ensure that confidential data is essentially scrambled from the target instance (as some DBAs may choose to manually scramble it while others may not). Additionally, even if the DBAs are using such custom scripts, these scripts may require some maintenance which adds to the overhead.
CTClone is database and ERP virtualization module that works with base module of Clonetab. CTClone can clone your Oracle eBusiness, PeopleSoft and Oracle Databases in less than an hour for most customers, irrespective of the database size*. It offers up to 80% disk/storage savings. CTClone uses proprietary methodology for faster cloning.
S3 allows non-DBA IT teams to run SQLs on Oracle Databases on in a self-service mode without sharing any passwords. Optionally, DBAs can continue to hold control on important instances like production. It comes with workflow and when workflow is enables, the approver has to approve the tasks such that S3-Engine can execute the S3 tasks. The SQL Self Service module can be used for important production tasks such as month-end, quarter-end, year-end closure SQL execution with approval mechanism and audit trail that can be retained for several years to satisfy the statutory compliance requirements. This module comes as in-built with Clonetab Cloning software or as a separate product called Clonetab S3.
Clonetab offers NetApp module to automate the cloning process for customers who use NetApp Storage. This module can automatically un-mount, mount, destroy, re-create the required volumes by assisting the storage/Unix administrators and can create flex clones. It reduces (or almost eliminates) the coordination time between System Administration team, storage team and DBA team while maintaining the ownership with respective teams. It can extensively make use of the “snapshot” technology and can complete the clones very fast irrespective of the size of the database.
Clonetab RAC module is required to clone your RAC instances, when both your source instance and target instance are under RAC. The basic module of Clonetab is sufficient to clone your instances when your source instance is RAC or Non RAC but the target instance is Non RAC.
Clonetab can clone Oracle database, Oracle e-Business suite instances running on most of the flavors of Linux/Unix. We are currently working on making the software work on Microsoft Windows platform. Please check with our sales team as to the platforms / versions supported or refer to our support/de-support notifications that are released periodically.
Yes, Clonetab has built-in intelligence to know how many tiers are on source and target instance and it can refresh even if the number of source instance tiers are different from the number of tiers in target instance.
When it comes to regulatory compliance IT teams must ensure that they support enterprise wide compliance efforts. The IT department itself must be in compliance with internal and external regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), HIPAA, FDA, Payment Card Industry -Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) etc. While SOX is more focused on database write events that can change the financial data, it is equally important with respect to database read events as fraud and financial manipulation can be perpetuated by knowing the bank account information or by knowing the financial results prior to public release and so on. Most of the compliance requirements with respect to the production environments are taken seriously by the corporations but they tend to ignore these controls for non-production environments that are cloned from the production. The environments that are cloned from production carry the same production data and hence need similar internal controls as that of production environment.
Usage of home grown scripts and/or manual execution of sequential commands remain one of the most widely used ad-hoc cloning tools for Oracle e-Business Suite/PeopleSoft and Oracle database at majority of the Oracle customers. These tools although help the DBA teams to complete their daily routines, they do not provide mechanism for maintaining audit trail, separation of duties, hinder the enterprise-wide compliance efforts and thus may violate the compliance regulations and the internal controls.
Given below are some examples of sensitive information.
We recommend using Clonetab software virtual appliance that comes as an OVF template that you can import into your VMWare ESXi or similar virtualization environments. For customers with heavy usage, we recommend using a Clonetab physical appliance. For customers with light usage a minimum 32 GB RAM is recommended and 500 GB disk space on specific versions of Oracle Enterprise Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For the user interface, we recommend standarb browsers with specific versions of Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Google Chrome etc.
You may contact our sales department via phone at 209-68CLONE (209-682-5663) or via email at sales@clonetab.com
Clonetab can help you immensely during the upgrade from EBS 12.1.x to 12.2.x and some of the major features and use cases are listed below:
You can also add Clonetab’s EBS DR solution that can bring up your DR Instance in less than an hour with very low RTP/RPO.
Clonetab offers three flavors of high-speed cloning solutions for customers whose database is on engineered systems / Exadata.
Clonetab offers several built-in security features including but not limited to the following security features:
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We always recommend that you back up your instances before cloning, whether cloning manually or using Clonetab.
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