UPDATED 11:53 EDT / OCTOBER 16 2012

Scott Lowe Defines Backup/Recovery Best Practices for Very large Oracle Databases in Face of Increasing Virtualization

The march of virtualization out of test/dev environments and through peripheral systems to increasingly encompass tier 1, business-critical environments, including huge Oracle databases, is changing the face of backup and recovery writes  Wikibon Analyst, independent consultant and former CIO Scott Lowe in his latest Wikibon Professional Alert. Virtualization has two major impacts which combine to increase pressure on underlying backup and recovery systems hugely:

First it combines multiple data streams, creating an even more massive single system. This makes it harder, for instance, to “divide and conquer” by scheduling the backups of different databases for different days or times. Backup windows are already insufficient in many large shops. This increased that pressure.

Second, the basic attraction of server virtualization was that it raises average utilization from 15% to 85%, allowing IT to save huge amounts of CapEx by cutting overall server capacity tremendously and centralizing computing on a few very large, and therefore more efficient, servers. The downside is that virtualized data centers have much less spare computing resource, which means less resource available for backup and recovery.

At the same time, data has become the currency of business. Most businesses, particularly large enterprises, cannot operate without access to their data. Even a small interruption in critical IT systems and databases can be disastrous. This makes a strong backup and recovery program, particularly for Oracle databases that in many large companies hold the vital data on which those companies operate, all the more vital.

Lowe has derived a set of best practices for Oracle and other large business databases based on previous Wikibon research by several members and conversations with vendors and other experts, that he lays out in this Professional Alert. These include implementing redundancy, testing recovery, and using dedup and Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) rather than manual procedures or third-party systems.

As with all Wikibon research, this paper is available in its entirety on the public Wikibon www.wikibon.org Web site. IT professionals are invited to register for membership in the Wikibon community. This allows them to comment on research and publish their own Professional Alerts, tips, questions, and relevant white papers. It also subscribes them to invitations to the periodic Peer Incite meetings, at which their peers discuss the solutions they have found to real-world problems, and to the Peer Incite Newsletter, in which Wikibon and outside experts analyze aspects of the subjects discussed in these meetings.


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