No, this is not a blog about Computational Fluid Dynamics - my least favorite subject in college. This is about a more exciting (sorry mechanical engineers!) CFD: Customer Facing Data. This is the data that is typically available on the website of an organization that their customers interact with. CFD can range all the way from profiles of users on a social networking site such as Facebook to the customer information database of an e-commerce company such as Travelocity.

CFD represents today’s data protection challenge. Probably the biggest challenge while planning a backup solution for CFD is that it is very hard to figure out what to plan for. You might be starting with a very small database which might grow much more rapidly than what you think. If the data can be segmented based on users or some other characteristic, then you will find that your databases may scale-out instead of scale-up. Also, rate of change can …

We have been focusing on providing the best possible backup solution for following scenario: 100 GB+ of data stored in MySQL database, Transaction intensive workload (i.e. rapid rate of change of data), with a business requirement to be able to perform point-in-time restoration of the MySQL database. Oh, the solution also needs to take into account that the database can grow to 1TB or more very quickly.

For such a scenario, we believe that the best possible solution today is a combination of:

1. Storage level snapshots - a capability built into ZFS (Solaris), NetApp, LVM (Linux), VxFS, and VSS (Windows)
2. Transaction logs generated by MySQL
3. Point-and-click restore capability provided by Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL

Two reports came out today which go into nitty-gritty of above. First is a joint report written by …

Today we announced a significant enhancement to our Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL product. Here are major highlights of this new version (2.1):

End-to-end support for Solaris: We have had increasing number of requests from customers for supporting Solaris. While we always protected MySQL databases running on Solaris, we needed customers to run the ZRM core engine on a Linux box. Now we are able to run the ZRM core engine on Solaris itself. So a pure Solaris shop can use ZRM without getting a Linux server. The coinciding of this support with MySQL’s acquisition by Sun was not a planned thing

Enhanced Snapshot support: One of the coolest features of ZRM is to be able to take advantage of underlying storage infrastructure whenever possible. Since version 1.0 of ZRM we have provided support for backing up MySQL …