Things are just starting to return to normal… I hope 🙂
The disruption associated with the production hardware reconfiguration seems to have calmed down now. Of course, not all of the problems were associated directly with the hardware changes, but the time you spend on one problem distracts you from other jobs you should be doing, which in turn creates new issues.
We have finally moved all the database backups over to RMAN against HP Data Protector, rather than the disk-based RMAN backups we were doing before. The software seems to work fine, but the physical processes are taking some time to get used to. Rather than having a tape labeled “Monday night application X backup”, we now have a bank of tapes in a media pool that can hold portions of several backups. It’s not rocket science, but it can be a bit of a culture shock when you start changing processes that have been in place for years. It takes a while for people to get used to the idea that you don’t know which tapes must be removed and taken offsite until the software tells you.
Fun, fun, fun 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Hi Tim,
Reading your recent postings, I was just curious as to how Oracle-Base works? Is Oracle-Base your company, and you are doing contract work for clients – hence your posting about changing backup routines – or is the work you’re talking about for your company itself, i.e. you host applications, databases and so on?
regards
Mark
Hi.
ORACLE-BASE is my hobby, it doesn’t pay the bills.
When I’m talking about work I’m talking about the company that are currently paying the bills 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
I assume you tested your restore speed and found it adequate? Tape robots have a tendency to backup stuff really fast but try to restore one file and you will learn the meaning of patience.
The word “test” does not compute 🙂
Just kidding. Both the backup and restore speeds look pretty good. The things we need real speed for are backed up to disk on DP, then copied on tape, so we always have the most recent backup on disk and tape.
Cheers
Tim…
Know what you are saying , Jeff
assume you tested your restore speed and found it adequate? Tape robots have a tendency to backup stuff really fast but try to restore one file and you will learn the meaning of patience
One of our customers had a six-tape drive backing up was quick(ish) but to restore a file that spread across tapes, well the right tapes needed to be in the correct drives at the same time and a full moon and….
Well, just to ask the sysadmin guys to do a restore last Sunday. We had to rollback an upgrade on a 4-tier E-business suite. Backup takes 4 hours. So horror, oh horror.
Don’t have the exact numbers. But
Once you get the rack with the SAN, tape drives and Data Protector Cell Manager installed in your house you can get rid of the central heating system 🙂
Oops……
Are you saying that I got rid of it too early? ;+(
One of our customers had a six-tape drive backing up was quick(ish) but to restore a file that spread across tapes, well the right tapes needed to be in the correct drives at the same time and a full moon and….
Throw in a miscalculated rman multiplexing factor and you’ve got 512K/sec streaming to a RAID 0+1 filesystem.