One of the questions that comes up often in the Backup world is “Why can’t I just write a script to do this myself!?”. Well, as a do-it-yourselfer myself, the answer is “Absolutely, a customized backup script can be written, and in fact, the first version of it won’t be that complicated to develop either”. However, a home-grown backup script can quickly become tedious to enhance and maintain.

Lets look at the progression of events following a decision made by a system administrator or a DBA to develop their own backup scripts. Lets take the example of Joe, a MySQL Database Administrator at an e-commerce company SuperWidgets:

1. January: SuperWidgets has been around for one year, and sales of their super widgets have been increasing. The CEO of SuperWidgets, Mary, has faced serious consequences of losing customer data before, and she tells Joe to make sure their MySQL database, which powers their web …

Today Sun announced the Sun Cloud, including its Sun Cloud Storage Service at CommunityOne East in New York. We announced our partnership with Sun on integrating all our three products: Amanda Enterprise, Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL and Zmanda Cloud Backup with Sun Cloud. In near future, our customers will be able to chose between Sun Cloud Storage or Amazon S3 as the destination of their backup archives. Also, users running critical application on the Sun Cloud Compute Service will be able to protect their data using Zmanda’s products.

Of particular interest to us is Sun’s approach to use open and well defined APIs for their cloud services. We …

In my previous blog on Cloud Backup, I wrote about the solutions we offer to backup to the Storage Cloud (e.g. Amazon S3). In this blog I will talk about backup of cloud, i.e. backup of your applications running on a Compute Cloud (e.g. Amazon EC2).

Let’s say you are migrating some on-premises applications (e.g. a customer facing enterprise app), which are currently being backed up to a tape library, to the cloud (fig 1).

Clouds don’t have a notion of a local tape library. So, your current backup solution will likely not work after this migration.

So, where do you backup? Note that Compute Cloud vendors do not offer automatic backups. While they may offer storage redundancy features, e.g. replication and snapshots, these are not replacement for a complete backup solution.

You still need backup archives and a backup catalog for those …

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? Considering that Time Slider does not support network attached disk yet, you might be in danger …

We released  ZRM for MySQL 2.1 Community Edition  today.  ZRM 2.1 includes the ability to treat snapshots as backup images. ZRM has supported backup of MySQL databases using storage snapshots using a plugin interface.  LVM (Logical Volume Manager) and Solaris ZFS snapshots are supported plugins in the ZRM Community Edition.
MySQL administrator can perform regular backups (backup images are stored in the ZRM server) or quick backups (snapshots acting as backup images). Quick backups have smaller backup windows and do not consume network bandwidth.  When MySQL database is stored on one or more ZFS filesystems, users can do multiple quick backups in a day (even once every hour) and convert one quick backup image to a …

In past few quarters Zmanda has been growing at a break-neck pace. This has transformed us in many different ways. In the past 12 months, we have almost quadrupled our customer base (which is now in 40 countries!), introduced our third product line (Zmanda Internet Backup) and built new relationships with some of the leading IT infrastructure providers in the world.

These changes merit a fresh introduction. Some of you have openly wondered about who we are. Well, here is your chance to hear directly from us. Join us for a webinar on December 17th at 10AM (Pacific Time), titled: …

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 …

Today we released version 3.0 of Zmanda Recovery Manger for MySQL. Here are the highlights of the release.

The new version of ZRM supports Zmanda Management Console (ZMC) running on 32- and 64-bit Ubuntu and Debian. We received quite a few requests for providing such support in the past.

In addition to Linux and Solaris, the ZRM server can now run on Windows. We supported logical and VSS-based backup for MySQL on Windows for a long time, but sometimes it was a challenge to introduce ZRM running on Linux/Solaris to all-Windows shops. Based on feedback from customers, prospects and from our partner MySQL, we have developed the version of ZRM that can protect MySQL in all-Windows environments.

We expanded the number of supported snapshot technologies by adding EMC CLARiiON SnapView to the list. This mid-range storage array is a staple for many data …

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..