Oracle Administrators need more and more control
over the different aspects of their environment as not only is the amount of
information in their databases growing in the order of TBs, but they find they
have less time to take backups, they have to satisfy retention requests for
more information over the longer term and they want that data to be available
online so they can get what they need when they need it and move on with their
lives.
DD Boost for RMAN allows Oracle Administrators to
manage the entire process of backup to, restore from and offsite DR with Data
Domain all from their existing
Oracle tools.
Boost integrating the RMAN client with the Data
Domain appliance and bringing it’s unique advantages into play, such
distributed segment processing which reduces the amount of data transmitted
across a network link during the backup operation by checking with the Data
Domain system that the data deduplicated by Boost isn’t already stored in the
appliance and doesn’t need to be transmitted again. This can dramatically
reduce the amount of time required to perform a full backup (Which Oracle
recommend if the change rate is more than 20% between backups) and as such can
really shrink the required backup window.
DD Boost for RMAN also provides application level
automatic load balancing across multiple paths to a Data Domain appliance
to ensure optimal information transfer performance during the backup operation.
And it does this while also ensuring failover due to a path going down will not
require a restart of the backup job. The job will just continue across the
surviving interfaces.
And then we come to offsite replication. DD Boost
for RMAN allows the Oracle Administrator to offsite their backups to additional
Data Domain appliances and do so in a catalogue consistent manner. Their
offsite copies, a product of replication between Data Domain appliances, will
be fully visible to them from RMAN and can be recovered from directly.
The bottom line is Oracle Database Administrators
can now use unique features of the dedicated protection infrastructure Backup
Administrators can make available to them from Data Domain without having to
write crazy scripts or learn new tools. This is infrastructure the Backup
Administrator has visibility into and can report on.
In turn the unique advantages of this infrastructure
in deduplicated storage capacity, replica management, encryption of data in
flight/data at rest and the fact it’s online negate the need to use production
storage to keep backups, which releases that storage to the Storage
Administrator for other uses. There’s a very simple concept at work here.
