Next-Generation Data Protection

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Next-Generation Data Protection

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NEXT-GENERATION DATA PROTECTION

Executive Summary

1 Introduction

1 Balancing Divergent Backup and Recovery Objectives

1 Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery

2 Flexible Options

2 Accelerate Deployment

3 Reduce Risk

4 Rely on Highly Available Architecture

4 Lower Total Cost of Ownership

5 Customers are Reaping the Benefit

6 A Large Government Agency

6 A Large Cloud Services Company

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1 | NEXT-GENERATION DATA PROTECTION

Executive Summary

In today’s competitive economy, enterprises depend on their applications to keep the business running

at peak efficiency. The loss of any of these applications or their data could bring the business to a halt.

To provide a suitably robust, high-performing platform, many organizations are hosting their

mission-critical applications on Oracle’s engineered systems. These systems provide pre-integrated, optimized

platforms for vital enterprise applications. Once the application platform is addressed, IT departments

must ensure the protection of vital corporate data. This requires comparable backup and recovery

systems that can deliver corresponding performance and service levels.

Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery delivers accelerated next-generation data

protection for Oracle’s engineered systems and Oracle Optimized Solutions. The flexible, multitier

architecture provides virtually unlimited scalability, centralized management, and end-to-end data

protection for heterogeneous technologies. Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery

accelerates Oracle Database backups and reduces the cost of engineered systems or Optimized

Solution backups compared to solutions from other vendors. The result is a comprehensive solution

that protects valuable corporate data, reduces risk, and lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) for

essential business systems.

Introduction

Virtually every company, regardless of size or industry, needs data archive capabilities. As environments grow in size, complexity, and diversity, administrators must cope with explosive data growth and the pressure to meet escalating service levels while backup windows shrink. In addition, legislative, corporate, and industry regulations mandate “forever” data retention and retrieval requirements. Combined with budget constraints, these requirements present IT staff with the stiff challenge of deploying a comprehensive, scalable backup solution while curbing costs and building forward-looking infrastructure.

Balancing Divergent Backup and Recovery Objectives

Large-scale databases and enterprise applications, such as those provisioned on Oracle Exadata Database Machine or Oracle SuperCluster systems, often have very challenging data protection requirements. In addition to the sheer magnitude of data they store, these large-scale systems often support 24x7 operations and have stringent service-level agreements (SLAs), recovery time objectives (RTOs), and recovery point objectives (RPOs). As databases expand to hold more business-critical data, the window of opportunity for backup and recovery operations shrinks, making solution performance critical.

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Figure 1. Enterprise backup and recovery solutions must address opposing requirements.

Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery

Understanding the need for balanced backup and recovery solutions, Oracle offers optimized architectures to protect business information stored in Oracle’s engineered systems, including Oracle SuperCluster, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, and Oracle Optimized Solutions. These pre-tested, high-performance architectures accelerate data protection processing and management with breakthrough cost structures based on Oracle servers, the Oracle Solaris operating system, and Oracle disk and tape storage systems.

Flexible Options

Oracle’s backup solutions are flexible, providing a wide range of deployment options—with or without backup software, employing disks, tape, or a combination of disk and tape. Three pre-tested configurations are available, with each tailored for different RTOs, RPOs, and backup client types (Figure 2). Organizations can select a base configuration and add storage capacity as needed.

» Capacity solution. This high-capacity disk and tape solution is designed for simple backup and recovery of the

Oracle Database and disk drives.

» Flexible performance solution. Comprised of low-latency disks and high-capacity tape, this solution is designed

for incrementally updated backups using Oracle Database tools. The solution enables low-latency connectivity to external development and testing environments.

» High performance package. Configured with the highest performing, most integrated disk and tape systems, this

solution is designed for extreme database backup and recovery.

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Figure 2. Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery provides a complete solution for any recovery time objective.

Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery is unique, offering industry-leading price/performance characteristics. The utilization of low-cost or zero-cost software enables the Oracle solution to deliver high

performance at less cost than any high-performance backup solution. Additional savings can be achieved with tape systems, the lowest-cost storage media that is ideal for storing older backup copies.

Near linear performance scaling is achieved by using pre-tested server and storage configurations for a building block approach. This architecture simplifies solution implementation and makes it easier to perform upgrades or expand systems as needed for data growth. With a compelling price/performance metric in mind, Oracle engineers identified optimal performance and sizing characteristics for the solution options, including the number of supported backup targets.

The sections that follow describe the business benefits that can be achieved with Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery. For more technical detail and architectural information, see “Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Secure Backup—A Technical White Paper.”

Accelerate Deployment

Typical data center backup and recovery deployments are a huge undertaking that involve many IT staff. Integrating, tuning, and testing complex solutions can be time-consuming. The more comprehensive a solution is, the greater the chance of human error during the build-out process. Even before testing and integration, myriad components from multiple vendors must be inventoried and correctly installed, a labor-intensive procedure that can add days to project time frames. The possibility of human error is high, and when errors occur, troubleshooting can be problematic.

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Reduce Risk

In addition to consuming days, weeks, or even months for planning and building, integrating a custom-built backup and recovery solution introduces additional risks. Figure 3 illustrates the complexity involved in building a backup and recovery system using a broad range of hardware and software technologies from a diverse set of vendors. With this approach, administrators must configure and integrate components, and determine compatibility and confirm interoperability (both initially and prior to any updates). In addition, they are tasked with testing and managing the heterogeneous environment, and dealing with a host of different vendor service organizations.

Figure 3. As a single solution provider, Oracle reduces deployment and interoperability risk.

Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery provides everything needed to deploy backup and recovery systems for Oracle‘s engineered systems. By providing a complete solution—servers, high-performance networking, encrypted tape storage, and management tools—Oracle removes many of the complexities associated with building and operating traditional backup and recovery systems. In addition, Oracle makes management easy with Oracle Enterprise Manager. This complete, applications-to-disk management tool enables IT staff to manage the entire environment, from the database and applications, to servers, firmware, virtual systems, operating systems, to administrative rights, storage, backup and recovery systems, patches and updates, and more.

IT staff must consider another serious risk: the ability to successfully restore backups in the event of a failure. Oracle Database contains features that work in conjunction with functions contained in the file system to ascertain database data integrity. This safeguards data and assures IT staff of successful restore operations without the need to spend time restoring data they later discover is corrupted.

Rely on Highly Available Architecture

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Backup and recovery systems must be able to restore production systems in time to meet service-level agreements in order to avoid a loss of business continuity or a negative impact on the bottom line.

Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery helps reduce the risk of downtime or data unavailability. With pre-integrated components and virtually no single point of failure, the solution continues to operate during a wide variety of potential failures in the backup and recovery system, and can minimize the impact of those failures. As a result, the pre-tested solutions designed to backup and recover Oracle SuperCluster, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, and Oracle Optimized Solutions provide the high availability needed to ensure data access and service-level agreements are maintained.

Lower Total Cost of Ownership

CIOs and IT managers are mindful of the impact that extremely expensive, multivendor, custom-built backup and recovery solutions have on already constrained budgets. Understanding the need to balance performance, cost, and risk, Oracle invested heavily in upfront solution engineering. This strategy enables Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery to deliver lower acquisition, deployment, administration, and operating costs for the backup and recovery of Oracle solutions. Savings can be realized in many different areas.

» Reduce deployment costs. Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery is available in pre-tested

configurations. Because the solution is validated by Oracle, IT organizations do not need to spend time performing onsite tuning and testing.

» Reduce risk with end-to-end, built-in security. Backup and recovery solutions require more security than

typical data center environments because many times they use rented or public networks to transfer data from site to site or physically transport data on removable media. Oracle Optimized Solutions provide functional security guidelines and best practices that protect your disaster recovery solution from end to end using built-in security technologies in every layer of the solution.

» Accelerate backup performance. The solution employs high-performance technologies to decrease backup

times and accommodate shrinking backup windows. Increased performance for database backups translates directly into efficiency gains for backup and recovery systems. Exclusive performance optimizations, such as high-value database integration features for Oracle Database, can result in percent faster database backups over solutions from other vendors.

» Eliminate specialized backup and recovery hardware. Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Backup and

Recovery provides a single multipurpose platform for backup, recovery, test, and development. Expensive, specialized, third-party hardware is not needed for backup operations.

» Reduce the need for special technical skills. Pre-integration and pre-testing reduces the need for

specialty-trained IT staff. Integration and deployment are straightforward. There is no need to train staff on new hardware or software components, or hire experts to manage components from multiple vendors.

» Streamline management. In the Oracle solution, a single console provides access to a complete set of

integrated management tools that simplify and automate administrative tasks. Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center manages the entire environment: applications, database, virtual systems, operating systems,

administrative rights, servers, storage, firmware, backup and recovery systems, patches and updates, and more. This integrated approach saves considerable time and money over working with a variety of multivendor tools, and minimizes the incidence of human errors that can lead to downtime.

» Lower licensing costs. IT organizations can save up to 75 percent in licensing costs with deployments utilizing

Oracle Secure Backup software. Calculating charges according to the number of tape drives, Oracle Secure Backup software licensing does not incur extra licensing costs for specialized clients such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine. This simplified, single-component software licensing offers complete enterprise features at one-fifth the cost of backup solutions from some other vendors. In fact, Oracle’s disk-only solutions do not incur any software licensing fees.

» Reduce media costs. Some solution configurations offer Oracle’s StorageTek tape and library solutions. These

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» Eliminate third-party backup software costs. Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery enables IT

organizations to use the backup and recovery tools included in Oracle’s operating system and database, without additional backup software.

» Continue to meet and deliver SLAs. Some solution configurations offer infinite scalability and no

single-point-of-failure along with a flexible multitier architecture. There is no need for forklift upgrades to expand capacity or increase performance as data volumes grow.

» Waste less storage space. Built-in database integration features in Oracle Database improve media utilization,

reducing the storage capacity requirements for backup operations.

» Increase resource utilization and reclaim data center space. IT departments can use Oracle Optimized

Solution for Backup and Recovery to consolidate disparate legacy backup solutions. Oracle estimates show a 50 percent increase in resource utilization and a 50 percent reduction in data center space requirements.

» Improve accountability. The Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery eliminates the finger pointing

and difficulty of determining which vendor is responsible in multivendor solutions. The result is faster time to resolution in the event that service or support is required.

Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery dramatically simplifies backup and recovery processing and management for replicated Oracle Exadata Database Machines, Oracle SuperCluster systems, and Oracle Optimized Solution deployments. In remotely replicated environments, IT organizations do not need to deploy complex, third-party, de-duplication technologies to ensure complete data protection. The Oracle solution enables copies of local and remote data to be encrypted to tape at both sites.

Customers are Reaping the Benefit

Organizations around the world, both public and private, are reaping the benefits of Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery deployment.

A Large Government Agency

A large U.S. state government agency needed a fully integrated information system to manage data for multiple public assistance programs. The agency needed the system to handle 5.5 million transactions per day, 11,000 transactions per minute during peak times, with 1.8 million database transactions per minute. The agency decided to migrate from Oracle’s SPARC Enterprise M8000 servers to the Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery on Oracle SuperCluster.

Within the Oracle SuperCluster system, the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance was used to host the agency’s

development and test environments and accommodate backups. This reduced required storage capacity by over 80 percent, while maintaining superior price/performance. The engineered solution allowed direct consolidation without the need for system recertification, in line with business requirements. As a result, the agency was able to reduce risk, improve cost efficiency, increase availability and performance, and ease migration and installation.

A Large Cloud Services Company

An industry-leading cloud service provider was looking for a better backup solution. The company has over twelve years of experience serving millions of end users, delivering enterprise-grade, end-to-end managed cloud services across a broad portfolio of business applications, middleware, database, and hardware technologies. Faced with the challenge of extreme, 100 percent data growth rates, the service provider required around-the-clock backups that would not interfere with customer processing. Encryption was required for all data to ensure customer data security. In addition, the solution had to be able to drop ship data to customers.

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StorageTek SL3000 modular library system and tape drives that provide massive capacity and extremely fast transfer rates. Delighted with the results, the company realized remarkable benefits across the board:

» Higher capacity and performance. The massive storage capacity of the solution easily stores more than 10 PB

of backups each month. By increasing the average tape transfer rate six-fold, the Oracle solution completes backups faster. Security is maintained through tape encryption.

» Improved storage efficiency and space savings. The solution reduced the number of tape silos by 66 percent

and reduced data center footprint by 47 percent. In addition, the company was able to decrease the number of tape drives used by 50 percent, while reducing the amount of tape media needed by 63 percent. In addition, the centralized tape backup management, backup schedules, and media retention features of the Oracle Secure Backup software further increase efficiency and savings.

» Greater operational efficiency at less cost. A rapid implementation accelerated three new data center

deployments, with each data center completed in less than one week. Labor costs are down, as the export features of the StorageTek SL3000 modular library system reduce the labor needed for data vaulting by three-fold. In addition, the solution handles planned and unplanned downtime without service interruption. To date, the Oracle Secure Backup software has saved the company more than $300,000 in renewal fees and annual maintenance costs.

Conclusion

Only Oracle has the hardware and software components needed to create integrated solutions that deliver value. Innovative Oracle hardware and software components come together in the Oracle Optimized Solution for Backup and Recovery to deliver optimal performance and enhanced productivity at less cost and with less risk. A single solution from a single vendor, the Oracle solution provides simplicity and elegance through a complete and tested solution that is optimized to best support backup and recovery operations.

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June 2015, Version 1.1 Author: Dean Halbeisen C O N N E C T W I T H U S

Next-Generation Data Protection