If you are coming to this year’s Oracle OpenWorld 2010, please do visit us at Booth #3824.

We will have our backup solution experts at the show to discuss any of your database or infrastructure backup needs.

When it comes to backing up various products offered by Oracle, we have several solutions:

• Amanda Enterprise: Backup solution for Oracle Enterprise Linux and Solaris based systems.
• Zmanda Oracle Agent: Backs up live Oracle databases to Amanda backup server - which can store backup archives on disks, tapes, or storage clouds.
• Zmanda Cloud

This week Zmanda was invited to participate in the launch of OpenSolaris 2008.11. In his interview Chander Kant, CEO of Zmanda, explained why OpenSolaris is a big step forward from backup and recovery perspective both as a data source for backup and as a repository for backup images.

The advanced snapshot capabilities of ZFS enables fast and scalable backups for today’s most demanding workloads for servers and easy to use data protection for workstations. For example, the new Time Slider feature in OpenSolaris provides an automatic way to backup your data on the local disk with intuitive browsing and recovering of files from snapshots using the GNOME file manager. That is great, but what if you loose your local disk?

Today Sun announced the new 7000 line (aka Amber Road) of open storage appliances. Amber Road runs OpenSolaris and ZFS on industry-standard x86 hardware and includes innovative management software developed by Sun’s FISHworks (Fully Integrated Software and Hardware) group.

Our engineers worked along with Sun’s technologists on Amber Road in Sun’s labs for past few weeks, and today we are announcing support for Amber Road with both of our products Amanda Enterprise and Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL.

Amber Road is another example of innovation and value created by combination of open source and open systems. Combine  Amber Road with Zmanda’s open source backup products

I attended OpenSolaris Storage Summit last weekend.  There are lot of efforts going on to make OpenSolaris into a feature rich storage operating system.  Some of the projects that are relevant to backup are NDMP, Storage de-duplication, Virus scanning, Disk encryption and ZFS hybrid storage pools.

I talked about Amanda network backup and recovery and how well it fits with OpenSolaris and ZFS plans. Amanda can backup ZFS filesystems taking advantage of ZFS snapshots. ZFS snapshots provides the ability to backup open files in Open Solaris. Amanda 2.6.1alpha OpenSolaris packages that are available for download takes advantage of this feature.  Amanda can also take advantage of

First, the announcement. On September 21st at 11:30am our VP of engineering Paddy Sreenivasan will talk at OpenSolaris Storage Summit in Santa Clara about Open Source backup software Amanda for OpenSolaris.

Now the news. Sun just published Sun Fire x4540 as Backup Server for Amanda Enterprise backup software quick-start guide on BigAdmin system administration portal. The guide provides an introduction to configuring the Sun Fire X4540 server as a backup server for backup to disk. The specific examples for configuring the zpool and ZFS file systems on the Solaris 10 illustrate how easy it is to provision high-capacity storage for backup to disk. The Zmanda

This month’s (September 2008) edition of Linux Journal has an in-depth review of Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL (written by Alolita Sharma a veteran of Open Source). Oh, and we made it on the cover as well! If you are browsing Magazines section of your local bookstore, do look us up..

We announced support for Oracle today. Specifically, Amanda Enterprise now protects:

• Oracle 11g on Windows
• Oracle 10g and 11g on Linux and Solaris
• Oracle Enterprise Linux

On Linux and Solaris, we took the approach of integrating Amanda with RMAN. Keeping with Amanda’s philosophy of using native tools as closely as possible, we allow Oracle DBAs to perform recovery right from within Oracle Enterprise Manager. Amanda takes care of restoring all files needed for a DBA to perform recovery specific to their need (e.g. table level recovery or point-in-time recovery).

For Windows, on recommendation from backup experts at Oracle, we integrated with their new VSS writer. This enables us to take quick snapshot of Oracle

Today Sun announced release of X4540 Open Storage server (a.k.a Thor). We were fortunate to get early access to Thor to certify Amanda Enterprise and Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL. Both solutions are optimized for backing up to disk, are already certified with Solaris 10, and leverage capabilities of ZFS. So it made perfect sense to certify them on Thor, effectively creating a high-performance and yet relatively inexpensive backup appliance.

The unit we were using is powered by 8 CPUs operating at 2300 MHz and provides 48 SATA drives with total capacity close to 50TB in 4U enclosure. That is good packing; a typical EMC unit with so much capacity will take the whole rack.

Storage Snapshots are excellent tools in arsenal of a system administrator to create quick and consistent backups of their databases and applications. Snapshot is a “picture” of a filesystem at a point-in-time. In most modern snapshot implementations, this “picture” is not a full copy of the data, but rather a set of pointers to the data.

Here is a list of current industry leading snapshot technologies:

• LVM Snapshots: Snapshot capability built into the Linux Volume Manager (LVM) - the default option on a Linux system.

• ZFS Snapshots: Snapshot capability built into the ZFS filesystem on Solaris and OpenSolaris

• NetApp SnapShots: A feature of the WAFL® (Write Anywhere File Layout) filesystem

• Windows VSS: Volume Shadow Copy Service from Microsoft

Final slides from keynote delivered this morning at the MySQL user conference. Topic was protecting live MySQL databases.

(Slides render well in both OpenOffice and PowerPoint)

No, this is not a blog about Computational Fluid Dynamics - my least favorite subject in college. This is about a more exciting (sorry mechanical engineers!) CFD: Customer Facing Data. This is the data that is typically available on the website of an organization that their customers interact with. CFD can range all the way from profiles of users on a social networking site such as Facebook to the customer information database of an e-commerce company such as Travelocity.

CFD represents today’s data protection challenge. Probably the biggest challenge while planning a backup solution for CFD is that it is very hard to figure out what to plan for. You might be starting with a very small database which might grow much more rapidly than what you think. If the data can be segmented based on users or some other characteristic,

We have been focusing on providing the best possible backup solution for following scenario: 100 GB+ of data stored in MySQL database, Transaction intensive workload (i.e. rapid rate of change of data), with a business requirement to be able to perform point-in-time restoration of the MySQL database. Oh, the solution also needs to take into account that the database can grow to 1TB or more very quickly.

For such a scenario, we believe that the best possible solution today is a combination of:

Two reports came out today which go into nitty-gritty of above. First is a joint report written by NetApp

Today we announced a significant enhancement to our Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL product. Here are major highlights of this new version (2.1):

End-to-end support for Solaris: We have had increasing number of requests from customers for supporting Solaris. While we always protected MySQL databases running on Solaris, we needed customers to run the ZRM core engine on a Linux box. Now we are able to run the ZRM core engine on Solaris itself. So a pure Solaris shop can use ZRM without getting a Linux server. The coinciding of this support with MySQL’s acquisition by Sun was not a planned thing

Enhanced Snapshot support: One of the coolest features