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.Backup Exec Feature Pack 5 from a Management Perspective
On August 2nd, Veritas released Feature Pack 5 for Backup Exec introducing a new technology called “Instant Recovery”. This technology allows administrators to stand up a virtual machine directly from a backup taken with Backup Exec. There are quite a lot articles on the Web that describe that feature and its benefits from a technical point of view. But how can it help companies from a financial and/or management perspective? Every company has to save costs and IT budgets are often one of the first to be cut down. Especially when it comes to setting up a test environment, many IT departments are kept on a short leash. Nevertheless, business continuity and disaster recovery possibilities are in everyone’s mind.
Feature Pack 1 for Backup Exec 15 delivers improved performance, intelligent backups and enhanced platform support
Hot on the heels of Backup Exec 15 we are excited to announce the availability of Feature Pack 1 (FP1) for Backup Exec 15. Feature packs build on the core strengths of Backup Exec by addressing the top customer needs for hybrid environments and mark the transition away from major releases into a more continuous delivery model.
