Using NetBackup with Oracle ZDLRA: A Collaborative Approach to Oracle Protection
I recently had a customer ask about NetBackup versus Oracle ZDLRA—a comparison I typically avoid framing as a competition. The reality is, NetBackup and ZDLRA can serve complementary roles, and leveraging both can deliver strong Oracle data protection while supporting broader organizational requirements. NetBackup provides robust, enterprise-grade Oracle coverage. It’s designed to meet the protection needs of most customers while supporting a secure, scalable 3-2-1 data protection strategy. Meanwhile, Oracle ZDLRA offers specialized functionality for Oracle database recovery that can integrate well into this strategy—though many customers aren't aware of how effectively the two can work together. If your organization has invested in ZDLRA—a purpose-built solution for Oracle backups, albeit with limited visibility outside of the DBA team—you don’t need to treat it as a standalone silo. NetBackup can be integrated to reduce overall deployment cost, improve operational visibility, and enhance long-term retention and disaster recovery capabilities across the enterprise. Optimizing ZDLRA with NetBackup Instead of sizing ZDLRA to retain months or years of data—or replicating it across sites to meet compliance and DR requirements—you can configure ZDLRA for short-term retention (e.g., a few weeks). From there, NetBackup can take over for long-term storage, ensuring cost-efficiency and compliance with data protection policies. By installing the NetBackup client directly on ZDLRA nodes, NetBackup can orchestrate backups from ZDLRA to its own storage tiers, enabling deduplicated, efficient data movement and long-term retention. This hybrid approach is generally more cost-effective and operationally sustainable than over-sizing ZDLRA. Integration Steps: NetBackup + ZDLRA To integrate NetBackup with ZDLRA for seamless Oracle protection: Install the NetBackup client on the ZDLRA nodes. Allow NetBackup to auto-discover the Oracle RAC databases hosted on the ZDLRA nodes. Configure credentials for the discovered RAC databases in NetBackup. Create an Oracle policy in NetBackup using the “Clients for use with scripts” option. Update the existing backup scripts on ZDLRA to include the necessary NetBackup configuration for those databases. Once configured, NetBackup will treat those Oracle databases like any other client—protecting them with centralized policy management, broad visibility, and efficient long-term retention. More importantly, this setup ensures stakeholders across IT, compliance, and business continuity can access recovery insights—not just DBAs. It’s Not Either/Or—It’s Better Together There’s no need to choose between NetBackup and ZDLRA. When used together, they deliver a comprehensive, scalable Oracle protection strategy that balances performance, cost, and visibility. Organizations gain the flexibility to align with both DBA-centric recovery workflows and broader enterprise data protection policies.Protecting Oracle Databases with HCC Using Veritas NetBackup
As organizations continue to adopt Oracle Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) to achieve substantial data reduction and performance optimization for data warehousing workloads, it becomes increasingly critical to ensure robust protection strategies for these databases. Veritas NetBackup delivers comprehensive support for Oracle databases leveraging HCC, seamlessly integrating with Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) to enable high-performance, policy-driven backups that maintain data integrity across both HCC-enabled and non-HCC storage environments. NetBackup leverages RMAN’s block-level capabilities to perform efficient full and incremental backups of Oracle databases, including those utilizing HCC on Oracle-engineered systems like Exadata and ZFS Storage Appliances. Through tight RMAN integration, NetBackup preserves the compression format during backup, minimizing storage consumption and backup windows while supporting deduplication for further optimization. This allows database administrators to maintain their HCC benefits even in backup and recovery workflows, while centralizing control and reporting through NetBackup’s interface. In recovery scenarios, NetBackup supports full flexibility whether restoring to an HCC-capable system or to a non-HCC environment. When recovering to an HCC-compatible platform, the compressed data remains usable in its native format, preserving both performance and storage efficiency. If recovery is directed to a non-HCC destination—such as traditional file systems or third-party storage—the restore process completes successfully, but the data must be uncompressed before it can be accessed. Full guidance on these options is available in Oracle’s official documentation on restoring HCC tables. NetBackup ensures that backup and recovery operations remain consistent and reliable across both HCC and non-HCC environments.
