Terrabyte DB backup time inputs needed

[tamilselvan]

Hrishy ,
If you maintain 1 TB Database, then you should backup the database on to disk first, then to tape.

Where do you backup first?

Tamil

[hrishy]

Hi Tamil

Yes we do backup on to disk first on a staging area..

regards
Hrishy

[sri_dba]

Dear Nagarjuna,

Can i have ur maild, Since i am a chennai guy I would like to talk
to you something regarding on backup and recovery strategy.

It would be great if u give me ur id.

Thanx in advance.

[tamilselvan]

Hrishy,

How much money can you afford for backing up 1 TB DB?
Depnding upon your spending capacity, I would offer some tips.

Tamil

[OracleDoc]

Hmmm, don't know if this will help but here it goes.
I had a 1.5t database on a Dell power edge with Linux. Used Netbackup with RMAN interface and went directly to tape via hot backup. It took 6 hours.

[hrishy]

Hi Tamil

Budget is not a constraint.we need to prepare a case study to put in a comprehensive case study..I am looking for a backup windo of less then 3 hours..probably SAN environment would be what i am loking for..and also put some data in readonly tablespace mode..

Tamil your tips would be more then welcome..

oracle Doc..its cool that your bnackup of 1.5T completes in 6 Hours..Just wundering if you could teel mee more about your environment like cpu power memeory and bandwidth of the attached tape drives.

regards
Hrishy

[jrpm]

TJI:
We have a couple of 1TB and 2TB databases. The main issue we have is with the i/o bandwidth to the tape drives. Using 3-4 channels, the 2TB database takes 12-15 hours to back up.

We are using both the BCV/mirror split approach and the 'Lots of Read Only' approach (depending on database.) The problem we have is the larger database doesn't have any read-only data. What we do is split out 1 set of a triplex mirror and mount them on a different server so that the files can be copied effectively without taking the database down. (Actually, it does come down for about 20 minutes to get the mirror set, but it is at 4am when no-one is around anyway--our window is 4am to 6am for maintenance.) It takes longer (we don't have as many channels) but there is effectively no down time. This is the BCV type approach (today).

[tamilselvan]

Hrishy,

Here are my suggestions:
1 Have Enough money ( around $1M) :
Go for EMC Disk Arrays and BCV Timefinder. In this setup, BCV will write the data on both disks (primary and secondary) which is transparent to oracle. You can do backup from 2nd Mirror without affecting the perf of primary disks. This is very expensive and effective because write is done at the hardware level.

2. Limited Money.
Buy SQLBacktrack product from BMC. This is the tool I used extensively. Configure your backup devices (disks) under separate controllers. Disable read ahead cache and enable write cache on the backup devices. The important point is not sharing the controllers between your oracle datafiles and backup disks. Stripe across 8 disks. I would prefer stripe size of 1MB per disk (or even more). Create 24/32 pools. After the backup is done, the backup disks can be BCVed to another set of disks that can be read by the Tape Backup software (Netbackup or Tivoli etc). This is the setup I use. The impact on DB is almost zero.

3 No Money.
Do not run oracle db.

Tamil