We recently purchased a Dell DL2100 to provide primary backups at our new datacenter site. I believe the Dell sales persons either lied to make the same, or were grossly ignorant of the product they were selling and purported to understand fully.
Our requirements were;
We needed Oracle Deduplication to conserve space at the primary site as well as to conserve bandwidth necessary to mirror the backups to a remote site in the future.
We needed the backup to run "across the SAN." We have an EMC Clariion CX4-120 at the datacenter. -- At our office, which we are migrating to a datacenter, we use batch scripts to put Oracle into "hot backup mode," we then snapshot the LUNs, exit hot backup mode, mount the snapshots to the BE server, and back them up as if they're local drives. Actual time Oracle is in hot backup mode is typically less than 30 seconds. Performance impact to the database server is minimal.
99% of what we backup are Oracle databases. All hosts are Windows 2008.
We were told by Dell that the DL2100 and thus Backup Exec 2010 could do all of this as long as we purchased the necessary Options and Agents. Everything sounded great, so we pulled the trigger. We purchased enough Oracle Agents for Windows for all our DB servers, the Dedupe Option, the Advanced Disk Based Backup Option (we also purchased Replication Manager from EMC for each host). It took a while to get everything talking but at this point it all the different pieces seem to work fine, individually.
Now, I'm afraid I already know the answers to the following questions, but I'm asking here to get an, at least, semi-official answer.
How do I get an Oracle Agent for Windows-style back to dedupe better than 1.0:1?
and
How do I get an Oracle Agent for Windows-style backup to traverse the SAN fabric rather than the LAN?
It would seem that the Oracle Agent is completely incompatible with deduplication, and the ADBO. I can find no way to make the Oracle Agent "take a snapshot" or otherwise backup "over the SAN." And of all my successful backups, the ones utilizing the Oracle Agent never have better than 1.0:1 deduplication. Backups of Windows file systems, on the other hand, do utilize the dedupe as well as the ADBO (and Replication Manager) properly and give a nice amount of dedupe. Compression and encryption are both disabled. And impact to the DB host is much greater than our current 30 seconds of hot backup mode. We're now using 15-25% of the network for an hour + at a time. Not good.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
If I'm missing a setting somewhere or if we need another "option" or "agent" I'd love to know what I'm missing. And if all you can do is confirm my suspicions that backups utilizing the Oracle Agent for Windows, A) cannot be deduped, B) will always run on the LAN and never the SAN. That's fine too. It’ll just give me and our Dell rep something to talk about.
Regards,
Simon Nelson
