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, then you will find that your databases may scale-out instead of scale-up. Also, rate of change can …

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:

1. Storage level snapshots - a capability built into ZFS (Solaris), NetApp, LVM (Linux), VxFS, and VSS (Windows)
2. Transaction logs generated by MySQL
3. Point-and-click restore capability provided by Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL

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

Today Sun and Zmanda announced our agreement to deliver a comprehensive, global data backup and recovery solution for MySQL Enterprise subscribers. Starting April 1st, MySQL Enterprise customers will be able to purchase ZRM for MySQL directly from Sun worldwide.

I think Zack’s comment in the press release captures the rationale for the deal:

“Protecting corporate data through effective backup and recovery is one of the most crucial tasks for a database administrator, and it can be a complex undertaking — especially for today’s large Web-scale applications,” said Zack Urlocker, VP of products, Sun Microsystems database group. “MySQL users have told us that global backup and recovery is very important to them, and we are thrilled that we can now offer ZRM for MySQL as an easy-to-use solution for protecting all of their MySQL data.”

Of …

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 of ZRM is to be able to take advantage of underlying storage infrastructure whenever possible. Since version 1.0 of ZRM we have provided support for backing up MySQL …

Congratulations to Marten and team on Sun’s acquisition of MySQL today! This is a billion dollar stamp of approval on the importance of the LAMP stack. This also gives another strong backing to the business model which involves giving one’s software away for free to up to 99+% of users!

This announcement comes at an interesting time for Zmanda. Just last week we announced support for the Solaris platform for our Amanda Enterprise product line. With our industry leading MySQL backup solution, we now have full coverage of operating systems and database software from the new Sun!

A great day for open source software and business of open source software!

We presented a webinar along with MySQL last week. The topic was MySQL Backup from the perspective of an Oracle DBA. We got some really good questions at the end of the webinar. Here is a transcript of Q&A:

Q from Trey: Will this Webinar be available online for viewing later?

A from MySQL: Yes. It will be on our site in a few days at http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/

Q from Randy: Is a copy of presentation available on web? Where?

A from Zmanda : slides are available on Zmanda Network: http://network.zmanda.com/

Q from Jing: Converting database from oracle to MySQL, any limitation regards the version compatibility?

A from MySQL: We provide a free GUI migration tool that helps migrate Oracle data objects to MySQL. For a complete and very detailed …

Red Hat Exchange went live minutes ago. We at Zmanda are thrilled to be one of the RHX launch partners: Alfresco, CentricCRM, Compiere, EnterpriseDB, Groundwork, Jaspersoft, Jive, MySQL, Pentaho, Scalix, SugarCRM, Zenoss, Zimbra and Zmanda. Congratulations to Matt Mattox and rest of RHX team at Red Hat.

The value of data stored in LAMP applications is increasing at an exponential pace. Indeed, the LAMP stack fuels an economy of its own - with its own currency, lingo and players. While e-commerce is the clear and present evidence of the LAMP powered economy, the currency for this economy is by no means just monetary. Value is manifested in many factors other than financial gains: personal reputation and legacy, karma points, creativity etc. The LAMP stack fires up innovation by enabling new ideas - you can quickly and cost-effectively prototype a concept which other’s may find bizarre.

User generated content (UGC) is one key currency of the LAMP stack. UGC, even votes (ok, diggs) on other’s UGC store tangible and lasting value. While naming “You”, a proxy for UGC, the Time’s Person of the Year 2006, The Time magazine said: “It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the many …

Today we launched our Amanda Enterprise Edition 2.6. This comes with Zmanda Management Console - a totally cool way to install, configure and manage backup environments. This was result of an amazing effort done by our developers in past few months. This is how the navigation bar of the Zmanda Management Console (ZMC) looks like:

One of our most important goals while designing a graphical interface for Amanda was to simplify the life of a backup administrator. We found existing backup products in the market to be unnecessarily complex to setup and manage. I (and rest of Zmanda team) believe that managing your backups should be simple. In order to get backup going, all we need to know is:

What do you want to backup? (e.g. what hosts, filesystems and applications)
Where do you want to …