As we continue to see MySQL being implemented in bigger and more challenging environments, we are working to ensure Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL (ZRM) matches this growth and provides a comprehensive, scalable backup management solution for MySQL that can easily integrate into any network backup infrastructure.

The latest release of ZRM for MySQL is a significant next step, bringing disk space and network usage optimization and enhanced backup reporting, along with simplified management to help configure backups quickly and intelligently.   Additionally, ZRM for MySQL 3.5 now supports backup of MySQL Enterprise Edition, MySQL Community Edition, SkySQL, MariaDB, and MySQL databases running on latest versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu and Windows – giving you an open choice for your MySQL infrastructure, now and in future, …

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 …

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 Backup: Backs …

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) …

Today we increased price for the Amanda Enterprise Backup Server. The new price for our Standard subscription level is $500 per year. Our online store is a place to quickly checkout prices for all our products on a single page. This price increase was done in conjunction with release of Amanda Enterprise 3.0, which represents several man years of R&D on the backup server, including advanced media management such as D2D2T. Our subscription provides access to software and enterprise-class support.

Amanda Enterprise is used by businesses of all shapes and sizes. But a typical scenario is the following:

• Backup Server on Linux
• One tape library with one or two tape drives. Or VTL on a NAS device.
• A mix of Linux & Windows servers and …

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 …