- Oracle Backup & DR – Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?
By Caitlin Gordon, Senior Product Marketing Manager, EMC Backup Recovery Systems
As we recently discussed in our blog on SQL server backups, there is oftentimes tension between database admins (DBA’s) and backup admins rooted in the need to protect mission critical application data. The issue is both DBAs and backup admins want control over database backup and recovery processes, often resulting in parallel database backup processes – by the DBA and backup admin – with silo’d storage on the backend.
In Oracle environments, Data Domain systems have successfully addressed this challenge by providing a consolidated storage platform for both DBA and backup admin initiated backups. The DBA can use the Oracle native backup and recovery utility – called Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) to send data directly to Data Domain and the backup admin can leverage their existing backup software, which integrates with RMAN, to backup the same Oracle database.
With both users backing up to the same deduplication storage system, only unique segments of data from the Oracle server will be stored and backup storage requirements are reduced by 10 to 30x on average. In addition, Data Domain network-efficient replication sends only unique data across the WAN for faster time-to-DR readiness.
Not resting on our laurels, as of April 24th the best just got better. Our new Data Domain Boost for Oracle RMAN (which Ben first talked about back in October) provides faster, more efficient Oracle backup and recovery by distributing parts of the deduplication process to the Oracle server. This means that RMAN will only send unique data from the Oracle server to the Data Domain system, which speeds backups by up to 50% and reduces LAN bandwidth requirements by up to 99%.
In addition, DD Boost enables DBA’s to control Data Domain replication via RMAN. Unlike any other Oracle backup solution, since RMAN can manage Data Domain replication it is fully aware of both the primary and remote backup copies of the Oracle database.
Data Domain Boost is focused on making backup and recovery faster and more efficient and empowering application owners to take control of these processes…and helping us all get along.
