Solve Your Top Oracle Data Management Problems

An active Oracle® environment—like any database environment—faces significant data-related challenges, including:

• Backing up data frequently enough without affecting production
• Enhancing recoverability
• Providing enough copies of a production database for QA, testing and other purposes
• Managing data across both primary and secondary storage

NetApp® SnapManager® for Oracle (SMO) is designed to significantly simplify all these tasks and more. A previous Tech OnTap article explained the internals of SMO and its close integration with Oracle ASM and other Oracle technologies.

In this article, I’ll examine how you can deploy SMO to simplify and even automate data protection, recovery, and cloning across both primary and secondary storage. To begin, I’ll describe how you can use SMO self-service data protection to delegate the ability to perform these tasks to DBAs or others in your organization so that you don’t have to be directly involved in every database-related operation on NetApp storage.

Enable Self-Service with Policy-Driven Data Protection

If your job is to meet the storage needs of an active Oracle environment, you probably spend a lot of your time addressing the requests of DBAs, developers, and testers. With SnapManager 3.0 for Oracle, you can delegate the ability to perform common tasks such as backups, restores, and cloning. This not only frees up your time, it makes your DBAs and developers more efficient as well. Because they can quickly perform necessary tasks and get on with their work without delay, they are more productive and more responsive to business needs.

By integrating with NetApp Protection Manager and NetApp Operations Manager (read previous Tech OnTap articles on Protection Manager and Operations Manager), SMO gives you the power of both tools, including a graphical user interface that allows you to fully control and automate:

• NetApp Snapshot™ copies for space-efficient backup on primary storage
• NetApp SnapVault™ for longer-term backups on secondary storage
• NetApp SnapMirror® for disaster recovery
• NetApp FlexClone® to create space-efficient clones of Oracle databases

Figure 1) Policy-driven data protection allows a storage administrator to delegate the ability
to perform certain storage tasks to users such as DBAs.

Role-based access control (RBAC) provides the granular security necessary to delegate the ability to perform any or all of these tasks to other users. You manage groups of users by defining roles and assigning users to those roles. Those users are able to perform the tasks delegated to them by using the SMO interface and do not need to have a detailed understanding of the underlying
storage configuration.

Backup

For backup, SnapManager for Oracle offers two levels of protection:

• Snapshot copies on primary storage
• SnapVault backups on secondary storage

SMO uses NetApp Snapshot technology to deliver extremely rapid and space-efficient backups that don’t affect the performance of a running database. Before each Snapshot copy is made, SMO puts the database in hot backup mode for consistency. Because backups can be done in a matter of minutes, you can perform multiple backups throughout the day without affecting production, while creating recovery points that reduce the total amount of data to be restored in the event of a failure. With the graphical scheduler, you can quickly create or modify schedules to automatically execute the backups you want. Full integration with Oracle RMAN provides support for block-level restores.

A key feature of SMO is that it maps the database contents (data files, archive logs, and so on) each time a backup is created. You no longer have to worry whether you have updated your backup script to include that new tablespace or data file, SMO takes care of it.

NetApp SnapVault allows you to keep backups on secondary disk storage (at a local or remote location) for an increased level of data protection. With SnapVault you can maintain a limited set of Snapshot copies on primary storage for immediate recovery needs while keeping Snapshot copies available on secondary storage, allowing you to quickly restore and recover databases from further back in time without resorting to tape.

You have full control over the schedule and retention policies on secondary storage, and for primary storage (local backups) you can delegate that ability to those in the organization in the best position to know when backups are required, so they can create the most effective backup schedules and/or perform ad hoc backups as needed.

Recovery

With SnapManager for Oracle, you can restore very quickly from data stored on disk, so you can quickly choose the right backup version and get up and running much faster.

New in SMO 3.0, the restore algorithm adds the ability to perform a volume-level SnapRestore® operation that reverts an entire volume to a saved state to quickly restore an entire database. (Because the entire volume is restored to an earlier state, the database layout must be done according to NetApp best practices so that foreign files, control files, or logs are not inadvertently restored.)

Restore options enable you to restore:

• The entire backup
• Only the tablespaces or data files you specify
• Only control files
• Control files along with data files or tablespaces

Recovery options enable you to recover the database to:

• The last transaction that occurred in the database
• A specific date and time
• A specific Oracle SCN
• The time of the backup

Disaster Recovery

SMO brings the same power and efficiency to disaster recovery that it does to backup. Through integration with Protection Manager, you can create a replication schedule to periodically synchronize your production data with your DR site. Efficient bandwidth utilization reduces your wide area networking costs, and you can mirror from primary storage to less-expensive secondary storage to further cut costs. In practice, these efficiencies often make it possible to provide disaster recovery for more applications.

Cloning

Another advantage that SMO brings to Oracle is the ability to create space-efficient clones on either primary or secondary storage by using the NetApp FlexClone capability of NetApp Data ONTAP® 7G, thereby avoiding the problems associated with traditional database copies.

An intuitive wizard-based tool streamlines the process. You can quickly create FlexClone-based database copies that consume additional disk space only when changes are made. This space efficiency means that you can create clones quickly whenever you need them with minimal impact in terms of performance, space, and wasted time.

With SMO, you can create clones on primary storage or from SnapVault backups or SnapMirror copies. This allows you to offload cloning work entirely from primary storage (where it might affect production) and also to support dev/test and other functions by using your SnapVault or SnapMirror storage systems.

This rapid, efficient cloning ability has the following significant advantages for the organization.

Dev/test. Because making clones has zero impact, you can refresh the cloned production data you use for your development work more often, so that you are always testing against current rather than stale data. Most shops refresh only once every 90 days.

Also, instead of having all your developers and testers share one or two copies of a test database, you can create a gold copy and clone it multiple times so that each person has his or her own clones to work with. You can even do destructive testing without affecting anything outside the clone. When the testing is finished, you simply delete the clone; and you can create a new, clean clone image in a matter of minutes.

The net result is significant improvements in development and test capabilities that can lead to improvements in application quality and faster application delivery.

Reporting. The situation is similar for business intelligence reporting. You can quickly create an up-to-date clone of your production database on secondary storage and run your reports against data that is as current as possible. More timely data translates to better business decisions.

Root cause analysis. The simplified cloning that SnapManager for Oracle offers can also streamline root cause analysis in the event of a database crash or other failure. You can clone the most recent backup before the crash and then use Oracle tools to replay the log files up to the exact point where the crash occurred and analyze the crash event in real time.

Conclusion

Naturally, there are a few practicalities involved. To take full advantage of all the functionality I’ve described in this article, you’ll need SnapManager for Oracle, SnapDrive, a FlexClone license, NetApp Protection Manager, NetApp Operations Manager, SnapRestore, and SnapVault and/or SnapMirror.

Once the appropriate software and infrastructure are in place, however, the result is a very powerful, streamlined Oracle data environment that rationalizes Oracle data protection and dramatically simplifies the process of creating copies of a production database for dev/test, reporting, or other purposes.

Got opinions about SMO? Ask questions, exchange ideas, and share your thoughts online in NetApp communities.

Tim Rutherford Product Manager Storage Management and Application Integration, NetApp Tim has worked in product management for over 10 years, drawing on 15 years’ experience in the software industry, where he has served as a front-line support engineer, worldwide product support lead, sales engineer, and project manager. Tim is passionate about data management and protection, always looking for ways to help customers get more value from their business data.