Friday, September 17, 2010

Exadata Backups - How, What, When, and How Fast

Exadata Technology has made a very big impact in the technology community. Many customers are very excited about the possibilities of the throughput and performance.  Other, more pragmatic customers, are worried about how this new technology will integrate into their existing environments.  Specifically, I hear a lot of customers concerned about how they are going to perform backups that will integrate with their existing solution.

The "How" is easy.  Oracle RMAN is the predominant tool of choice for backing up Oracle databases today.  With Exadata, this is still the best answer.  Most backup hardware / software solutions today already integrate with Oracle RMAN.  This makes Exadata integration easy for most environments.

The "What" hardware question is a little more difficult.  My preferred method is to use Oracle Data Guard for maximum availability to a remote data center and then use this remote copy to perform backups to disk or tape.  While not every customer has this level of requirement, it provides the highest degree of availability with the least impact to overall performance.  Here is a high level view:

Multisite Data Guard with Tape backup


To get the very best understanding of the "When" and "How Fast" you should read to following white papers recently published by Oracle:



and


The first white paper defines a model for calculating backup speed as well as recovery speed. This document also explains the hardware and software necessary to successfully integrate this solution into any data center.  The second document clearly identifies the best practice for implementing Oracle Data Guard with Exadata.  These are both "Must Reads" for anyone bringing Exadata into their data center!

Until next time...... Ciao!
Stephen Dickson 
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