Today Sun announced release of X4540 Open Storage server (a.k.a Thor). We were fortunate to get early access to Thor to certify Amanda Enterprise and Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL. Both solutions are optimized for backing up to disk, are already certified with Solaris 10, and leverage capabilities of ZFS. So it made perfect sense to certify them on Thor, effectively creating a high-performance and yet relatively inexpensive backup appliance.

The unit we were using is powered by 8 CPUs operating at 2300 MHz and provides 48 SATA drives with total capacity close to 50TB in 4U enclosure. That is good packing; a typical EMC unit with so much capacity will take the whole rack.

Here are my slides used for presentation at Red Hat Summit in Boston last week:

Zmanda: Open Source Backup (.odp open office format, 1.7MB)

The Red Hat Summit started today here in Boston. Based on the evening reception today, it is shaping up to be a pretty good show. I will be speaking at the show on Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 11:30 AM eastern time. I will discuss current state of open source backup as well as where things are headed. We also have a booth located towards the right side of the exhibit floor (by small meeting rooms). We are demonstrating Amanda as well as ZRM for MySQL. Do stop by if you are coming to the show!
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MySQL Quickpolls might be insightful for people who develop products and services for MySQL. Recently I was looking again at “How do you backup your production database” poll. To interpret the results, I wanted to know who are the people answering that and other Quickpolls. Are they the DBAs responsible for running MySQL in production or the developers writing applications that use MySQL? For a backup guy like me knowing that makes a difference.

Every Quickpoll gets a time stamp when opened and tells how many people answered the poll. It occurred to me that the normalized number of people (MySQL polls run for different periods of time) answering each poll could give me some insight. The graph below shows the daily number of people answering each poll in the last 24 months.

Of course, I understand there could be self-selection …

For many MySQL implementations scalability is a crucial requirement. Scaling on various dimensions: Size, Performance, Cost and DBA-Stress-Level.

While several factors impact the scalability of the database, underlying storage probably has the highest impact. You need to make sure that the storage will fill up the buffers fast enough to keep queries happy, and acknowledge the writes fast enough to keep transactions happy. You need to make sure that you can keep growing the available storage as your database grows - MySQL databases are particularly prone to collect more and more data. You also need to make sure that maintenance tasks such as backup, cloning, and application testing will scale gracefully with the size of your database.

Storage systems from NetApp are a great choice when designing for MySQL scalability. Administrators can expand storage on the go …

Storage Snapshots are excellent tools in arsenal of a system administrator to create quick and consistent backups of their databases and applications. Snapshot is a “picture” of a filesystem at a point-in-time. In most modern snapshot implementations, this “picture” is not a full copy of the data, but rather a set of pointers to the data.

Here is a list of current industry leading snapshot technologies:

• LVM Snapshots: Snapshot capability built into the Linux Volume Manager (LVM) - the default option on a Linux system.

• ZFS Snapshots: Snapshot capability built into the ZFS filesystem on Solaris and OpenSolaris

• NetApp SnapShots: A feature of the WAFL® (Write Anywhere File Layout) filesystem

• Windows VSS: Volume Shadow Copy Service from Microsoft introduced in …

MySQL databases are increasingly used by high volume, high transaction applications
that support businesses running full throttle 24-hours a day, seven days a week.
Backup and recovery operations need to be conducted in such as way that is non-disruptive
to users and applications. The latest release of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) 2.2 provides
Continuous Data Protection (CDP) as well as instant point-in-time recovery for MySQL.
In this webinar, we will demonstrate the latest ZRM enhancements so that you can use ZRM
to build a robust, flexible, and easy to use backup and recovery solution.

When: Thursday May 29, 2008, 10:00am Pacific / 1:00pm Eastern

Ask any DBA what are his top priorities for backup of MySQL. Chances are that hot backup and recovery to a specific point-in-time (or transaction) will be on top of everybody?s list.

The recovery to any point-in-time has been always an ultimate goal for data protection. Traditional backup solutions allow recovering only to a point in time when the last backup took place, e.g. last night. A lot of new data could be created and lost since that last backup. That is why in the last several years many vendors have been working on Continuous Data Protection (CDP).

Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) defines Continuous Data Protection (CDP) as “a class of mechanisms that continuously capture or track data modifications enabling recovery to previous points in time”.

Final slides from keynote delivered this morning at the MySQL user conference. Topic was protecting live MySQL databases.

(Slides render well in both OpenOffice and PowerPoint)

You have to have been living under a rock, if you did not know that today is the first day of MySQL Users’ Conference and Expo. We at Zmanda are so proud and privileged to have been awarded the “Partner of The Year”. The award is very meaningful to our vision of Simplified, Easy to use, commercial Open Source Backup and Recovery. We appreciate the award and are committed to making the life of the MySQL DBA hassle free. We have had a ton of visitors from all walks of MySQL user community talk to us today. Its fascinating to talk to customer and prospects on how they leverage the power of MySQL. To learn more about how Zmanda provides the Best in Class Backup and Recovery solution for MySQL, you can attend Zmanda’s sessions at the MySQL Conference & Expo include:
What: “Radically Simple Backup & Recovery for Live MySQL”
Who: Chander Kant, Zmanda CEO and founder
…