I am very excited to share that today Zmanda has combined forces with Carbonite - the best known brand in cloud backup. I want to take this opportunity to introduce you to Carbonite and tell you what this announcement means to the extended Zmanda family, including our employees, customers, resellers and partners.

First, we become “Zmanda - A Carbonite Company” instead of “Zmanda, Inc.” and I will continue to lead the Zmanda business operations. Carbonite will continue to focus on backing up desktops, laptops, file servers, and mobile devices. Zmanda will continue to focus on backup of servers and databases. Carbonite’s sales team will start selling Zmanda Cloud Backup directly and through its channels. Since Carbonite already has a much larger installed base of users and resellers, our growth should …

As MySQL continues to grow (as a technology and as an ecosystem) the need and importance of creating and deploying robust MySQL backup solutions grows as well. In many circles Zmanda is known as “The MySQL Backup Company”. While we provide backup of a wide variety of environments, we gladly take the label of backing up the most popular open source database in the world, especially as we kick off our presence at the 2012 MySQL Conference.

Here are some of the updates to our MySQL backup technologies that we are announcing at the conference:

Announcing Zmanda Recovery Manager 3.4

We have updated the popular Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL product for …

We are adding support for Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region in Zmanda Cloud Backup (ZCB). This is the fifth worldwide location supported by ZCB.

This support provides faster uploads for ZCB users in Japan. Throughput will be significantly higher because of less hops along the way and very high bandwidth connections typically available in Japan. Overall processing will be faster because of lower latency (expected to be single digit millisecond latency for most end users in Japan).

Cloud Backup to Three Continents Now Includes Japan

This support enables users to ensure that their data does not leave Japan, e.g. if required for compliance reasons.

In summary, users in Japan now have an effective and scalable solution to backup …

Setting up of a good backup and recovery strategy is crucial for any serious MySQL implementation. This strategy can vary from site to site based on various factors including size of the database, rate of change, security needs, retention and other compliance policy etc. In general, it is also required from MySQL DBAs to have least possible impact on usability and performance of the database at the time of backup - i.e MySQL and its dependent applications should remain hot during backup.

Join MySQL backup experts from Zmanda for two webinars dedicated to hot backup of MySQL:

MySQL Backup Essentials: In this webinar, we will go over best practices for backing up live MySQL databases. We will also cover Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL product in detail, including a walk through the configuration and management processes. …

An increasing number of large MySQL applications, e.g. social networking and SaaS back-ends, use a distributed MySQL architecture. MySQL data is distributed logically or heuristically on multiple, and in some cases thousands of, real or virtual servers. Backing up such large and dynamic environments presents its own complexities.

In this blog, we will use the cluster terminology - but we do not imply that NDB Cluster storage engine is being used for MySQL. Most implementations use InnoDB for data and MyISAM for dictionary. Typical architecture for such applications uses Database Sharding - i.e. shared-nothing partitioning of data across similarly configured nodes.

In most sharded environments, high availability is built-in - i.e. the cluster can continue to answer the queries and commit the transactions of all users in face of a node failure. This is typically accomplished either by database level replication or …

If you are running your MySQL databases on the Amazon EC2 compute cloud, Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL can perform fast full backups of these databases by using Elastic Block Store (EBS) Snapshots. ZRM takes only a momentary read lock on the MySQL database during the creation of the snapshot, in order to ensure consistency of the backed up database archive. MySQL Backups using Amazon EBS snapshots are differential backups, meaning that only the blocks that have changed since your last full backup (via EBS snapshot) will be saved. For example, if you have a database with 100 GBs of data, but only 5 GBs of data has changed since your last snapshot, only the 5 additional GBs of snapshot data will be stored back to Amazon S3 during the current full backup run.

ZRM automatically deletes EBS snapshots (containing full backups of MySQL) according to the configured …

We recently added support for Windows 7 to both Zmanda Cloud Backup and Amanda Enterprise. Zmanda Cloud Backup stores its backup archives on the Amazon S3 Storage Cloud. Amanda Enterprise has the option to do so. Users can backup both the Windows file systems and system state, as well as various Microsoft applications, Oracle and MySQL databases. Now we support all Windows versions supported by Microsoft, including Windows 7.

To upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7, Microsoft recommends users to backup their Windows XP to external hard disk and then install Windows 7. Backup to (and Restore from) …

Last week we had a lively panel discussion moderated by Dave Nielsen, founder of CloudCamp, with leading experts in cloud computing on the panel: Chander Kant (CEO, Zmanda) & Michael Crandell (CEO, RightScale). Chander and Michael shared their insights into how their customers are using cloud computing and achieving new levels of reliability and recoverability. Here is a video archive of the panel. 

This panel discusses how you can migrate your apps and data to the cloud in a way that’s affordable and reliable and how to integrate the cloud into your IT strategy. Also hear about real-world examples of companies using the cloud for data backup and recovery and understand the hurdles to moving to the cloud, and how you can overcome them.

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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 …