OmniBack works with HPUX 11.0 running Oracle Application

[twang]

Hello, I am planning to purchase OmniBack for our Oracle database backup task. because it works fine with HP-UX and we hope it can advantage us to apply online backup strategy.
Currently we are running Oracle Application on D-class server, now we are using Cold Backup strategy for datbase backup task. But we can see that it doesn't allow us in the comming future, because the application downtime is relatively long.
Is there any suggestions for our environment? And how well does the OmniBack work with Oracle?

Thanks in advance for your helps.
tommy

[Marc Dijkstra]

Of the many ways to back up Oracle, I believe that the on-line is the most efficient, with no down time. Obviously there is also the split mirror backups etc. but I think that you should stick to this one.

I am attaching a white paper, and I think you check out http://openview.hp.com too.

MND

[Dave Chamberlin]

We use OmniBack with our 25G Oracle database. It has a comfortable interface to use. We Run a cold backup early AM on Sundays, a hot backup midweek, and incrementals each night. It is easy to restore data or change the schedule times.

[Satish Y]

It's good idea, But should adopt it if your total database size is large(say morethan 20GB) as it is little costlier.

Cheers....
Satish.

[Dave Wherry]

It's more than just OmniBack and Oracle in the equation. What kind of tape drive and how many are you using? We backup a 330GB Oracle database to 3 DLT8000 drives in 3 hours and 40 minutes. If I add a 4th tape drive I can drop it down to 2 hours and 40 minutes.
A lot of it depends on how you architect the hardware. We'r ealso running on XP256 disks.

[DavidH_2]

I also suggest to use hp business copy combin with omniback, it can reduce hotbackup time greatly if database size is large.

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

If you use Business Copy, there will be some downtime incurred during the period it is needed to shutdown the Oracle instance, perform the BC pairslit, and subsequently starting back up the Oracle instance.

Despite the downtime incurred, it is more efficient and clean as it limits your disk I/Os to a shorter backup period instead of much longer backup period via online backup. In terms of performance, if you are using BC, you will not be spilling I/O operations for the backup over to more critical production time frames eg. 8 to 5 pm. As a result, database I/O performance will not be impacted during critical periods.

In addition, you reduce the window of vulnerability. Using a BC split, you have a complete and consistent set of backup. The chance of the server crashing during the small time window when the pairsplit took place is very small. However, if you use online backup, the online backup spreads across many more hours. There is a higher chance of the server crashing when the online backup is taking place. When that happens, you will not have a complete and consistent set of backup.

Lastly, with online backup, you must be prepared for extremely large redo logs and archive logs during the online backup itself. This is because the tablespaces are altered during the online backup.

As the database grows larger, the above 3 aspects would become more significant.

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong
Brainbench MVP for Unix Admin
http://www.brainbench.com

[Alexander M. Ermes]

Hi there.
We use OmniBack to backup our Oracle databases for some time now. We backup 15 databases with Oracle Applications every night with a cold backup. We use a DLT library with 6 DLT 7000
drives and do the backup with four drives. These drives have a rate of 36 GB/hr.
So it is possible to backup 400 GB in 3 hrs.
The shutdown and startup of the databases
including the Concurrent Manager takes approx. 15 minutes for shutdown and 15 minutes for startup. So we have a complete backup time of 3.5 hrs. On the other hand if you have the Onnline extension for Oracle with OmniBack you can do hot backups as well. Depending on the version of the Oracle database you can also use the rman utility of Oracle with OmniBack.
You have to consider just a few things before you do the final decision.
Hope i did not confuse you too much.
Rgds
Alexander M. Ermes