CentOS - Jan 2009 - Backup methods for an Oracle DB

Hi,

	I've been testing different methods and I'd like to have some advice. 
I want to perform a cold backup once a week on the Oracle DB, and put it 
on tape.  I'm using EMC Networker for backup software, and I am not too 
at ease with the fact of doing eveything with Networker, because if 
there is a problem with the backup, the Oracle DB might not come up 
after the backup run.

	So I thought of using disk-based backup.  I've tried scp'ing the files 
directly to my backup server, but the operation is too long (120 min). 
I tried generating a tar.gz directly to my backup server via SSH.  A 
decent 40 minutes, using mgzip (multi-thread gzip), 70 Gigs.  120 
minutes for a tar.bz2, using pbzip2 (parralel bzip2) (54 Gigs).  A tar 
sent directly to my backup server is quite huge (318 Gigs).  It is then 
taken to tape on the regular nightly backup.

My concerns are:

- Time needed to perform backup (downtime).
- Time needed to do a recovery.

For the backup, sending a tar.gz directly to the backup server seems to 
be the best option.  However, since I want to minimize the time needed 
to perform a recovery, I'd like to have raw files on tape, not in a 
tarball and not compressed (the tape is compressing anyway).

Up to now, I've been quite disappointed by the speed at which my backup 
server can decompress and untar, and this server has quite good 
hardware.  When I use iostat -x, I find that the %util of the device is 
averaging 80%.

Here is the hardware involved:

Oracle Server:

HP Proliant 380DL + MSA70
16 GB ram
2 x Quad-core Xeons E5345 2.33 Ghz
9 RAID 10 volumes on 32 72G, 15K rpm SAS disks
1X Smart Array P400 w/512 MB BBU
1X Smart Array P800 w/512 MB BBU

Database Server

HP Proliant 360DL
2 x Quad-core Xeons E5345 2.33 Ghz
1 RAID 5 volume on 6 146 GB, 10K rpm SAS disks
1X Smart Array P400 w/512 MB BBU

Any help or suggestions welcome.

Regards,

Ugo

Ugo Bellavance wrote:
> Hi,
>
> 	I've been testing different methods and I'd like to have some
advice.
> I want to perform a cold backup once a week on the Oracle DB, and put it
> on tape.  I'm using EMC Networker for backup software, and I am not too
> at ease with the fact of doing eveything with Networker, because if
> there is a problem with the backup, the Oracle DB might not come up
> after the backup run.
What version and edition of Oracle?

Use RMAN, that's what it's there for. You can backup online, or
offline, full or incremental.

At my last company we ran Oracle 10gR2 standard edition connected to
a small fiber channel SAN. I wrote a script that put the tables on the
primary server in hotbackup mode, then snapshotted the Oracle volumes,
and mounted the snapshots onto a virtual machine that was running
software iSCSI. From there a job kicked off and ran RMAN to backup
the database.

Prior to that we ran enterprise edition and was able to run RMAN
directly from the physical standby server. With standard edition
you can't do that.

The migration from Oracle EE to Oracle SE probably paid for the
SAN in itself let alone the massive increases in productivity
gained by the flexibility of a centralized storage system(copying
production data went from ~2 days to about 1 hour, copying data
to reporting database went from ~8 hours to ~10 minutes).

You can also run RMAN against the primary system as well(any edition
I believe), though I didn't want to do that as it'd impact
performance.

nate