We are happy to announce the beta release of BackupPC Community Edition version 3.1.0+ftp.

This release contains backup and recovery using ftp protocol and other changes to improve testability and maintainability on top of 3.1.0 release.  Zmanda engineers have been working on these changes for last few months.

We provide rpm packages for RedHat Enterprise 4 and 5, Suse Linux Enterprise 9 and 10. We will be adding BackupPC packages for other platforms in the near future.

Please provide feedback on the beta release. We would be happy to hear from you about feature suggestions as well as any questions.

http://www.backuppc.com/ is a good place to start.

Today Sun announced the new 7000 line (aka Amber Road) of open storage appliances. Amber Road runs OpenSolaris and ZFS on industry-standard x86 hardware and includes innovative management software developed by Sun’s FISHworks (Fully Integrated Software and Hardware) group.

Our engineers worked along with Sun’s technologists on Amber Road in Sun’s labs for past few weeks, and today we are announcing support for Amber Road with both of our products Amanda Enterprise and Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL.

Amber Road is another example of innovation and value created by combination of open source and open systems. Combine  Amber Road with Zmanda’s open source backup products and you can deploy an extremely scalable and blazing fast backup solution at 1/5th the cost of products from proprietary vendors. We are also offering a free 60 days trial to all Sun Storage Systems customers (please contact your Sun or Zmanda sales rep for this).

The GFS tape rotation scheme is a popular method of maintaining backups on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. The primary purpose of the GFS scheme is to suggest a minimum standard and consistent interval at which to rotate and retire the media.

In general, GFS backup schemes are based on a seven-day weekly schedule beginning any day. A full backup is performed at least once a week. On all other days, full, partial, or no backups are performed. The daily backups are the Sons. One full backup in the week (the weekly backup) is the Father. One full backup of the month (the monthly backup) is the Grandfather. GFS rotation schemes allow you to back up your servers for an entire year using a minimum number of media.

Amanda can be used to implement GFS tape rotation schedule. User can implement three backup sets for daily, weekly, monthly schedule. An example for 5 day GFS tape rotation is explained below.

Daily full/incremental backup on Mon-Thu, weekly full backup on Fridays and monthly full backup on first Friday of the month.

1. Daily backup set is scheduled to run weekdays (M-Thu). The Amanda backup cycle is set to 4.
2. Weekly backup set is scheduled to do backup on Friday. The Amanda strategy is set to “noinc” and a tape rotation cycle of 5.
3. Monthly backup set is scheduled to to backup on first Friday of the month. The Amanda strategy is set to “noinc” and a tape rotation cycle of 13.

Amanda enterprise management console allows the administrator to identify the media volume that was used for the backup, media volume that will be used next and also information about client, media backup failures.

Users can move tapes from daily backup set to weekly backup set and from weekly backup set to monthly backup set to reduce the wear/tear on the media.

Today we released version 3.0 of Zmanda Recovery Manger for MySQL. Here are the highlights of the release.

The new version of ZRM supports Zmanda Management Console (ZMC) running on 32- and 64-bit Ubuntu and Debian. We received quite a few requests for providing such support in the past.

In addition to Linux and Solaris, the ZRM server can now run on Windows. We supported logical and VSS-based backup for MySQL on Windows for a long time, but sometimes it was a challenge to introduce ZRM running on Linux/Solaris to all-Windows shops. Based on feedback from customers, prospects and from our partner MySQL, we have developed the version of ZRM that can protect MySQL in all-Windows environments.

We expanded the number of supported snapshot technologies by adding EMC CLARiiON SnapView to the list. This mid-range storage array is a staple for many data centers. Now the users who run MySQL on CLARiiON, will be able to take advantage of very fast and space-efficient snapshot capabilities of SnapView.

Lastly, based on requests of many users, the new version of ZRM provides the capability of doing backup of files at the same time as backup of MySQL database. For example, you can backup the directory and configuration files of application that is powered by MySQL. That simplifies recovery of a database and the application that uses MySQL.
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Dmitri Joukovski

Backup continues to be a challenge for Oracle DBAs. That message was repeated again and again by attendees of OracleWorld in San Francisco last week.

The DBAs consistently bring up three challenges of Oracle backup: Cost, Complexity and Control

Cost
For many organizations the Oracle modules for Veritas NetBackup and Legato NetWorker are out of reach because of high cost. According to Sun ’s online store, the list price for NetBackup Oracle module running on a Solaris server with 2 CPUs is $7,500. What if you have multiple Oracle servers to backup? This can add up very quickly.

Complexity
To avoid paying unreasonable licensing and maintenance fees for NetBackup and Legato, many DBAs write their own RMAN scripts. RMAN is a well documented tool and it seems relatively easy to write a few lines to schedule backup of a single database. However, over time the script gets more complicated, configurations and requirements change, a DBA who wrote the original script gets promoted and moves to another group … and you are stuck trying to figure out when was the last successful backup and how to get your data back.

Control
Who do you depend on to get your data back? In most organizations the roles of DBA and backup administrators are separate. You, as a DBA are paid to protect Oracle data, but often times you have to ask the backup guys to get your data back. The lack of control could be even worse. As soon as your organization starts using NetBackup (or any other backup that keeps data in proprietary formats), your data becomes hostage to Veritas software. You can never recover your own Oracle or any other backups unless you continue paying Veritas.

If you face any of the challenges above, check out Amanda Enterprise for backup of Oracle. For a low cost you will get an easy to use solution that provides you with a full control over Oracle backups and recoveries.
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Dmitri Joukovski

Over the years Amanda has added lots of media choices to store backup archives: SAN, NAS, Amazon S3 etc. But tapes remain one of the most popular destination. Gavin, who blogs under a to-the-point title “I Do Linux”, has written a detailed how-to on installing and configuring Amanda with Tape Libraries. He has two setups: One setup (which backs up over a terabyte of Maildir for 3000 users) has Amanda backing up to a Spectra Logic T50 LTO2 tape library, containing 5 magazines/terapacks and 50 tape slots. Second setup (which backs up 4TB of research data for over 100 users) has Amanda backup archives going to a Dell PowerVault TL2000 LTO4 tape library, containing 2 magazines and 23 tape slots.

Vyatta has rocked the networking world by developing the first commercially supported, open source router and firewall solution. Ambitions of changing the rules of the game of a huge industry, come with very critical data - which doubles in size every year! They also come with a very heterogeneous environment:  Fedora, Debian, Red Hat, and Ubuntu - well, as long as it is a Linux distro

Vyatta recognized the need for a formal backup solution to replace the homegrown backup scripts, and chose Amanda Enterprise. Amanda backs up terabytes of Vyatta’s data spread across web sites, e-mail server, source-code repository, databases, and user files. Here is the full story.

I attended OpenSolaris Storage Summit last weekend.  There are lot of efforts going on to make OpenSolaris into a feature rich storage operating system.  Some of the projects that are relevant to backup are NDMP, Storage de-duplication, Virus scanning, Disk encryption and ZFS hybrid storage pools.

I talked about Amanda network backup and recovery and how well it fits with OpenSolaris and ZFS plans. Amanda can backup ZFS filesystems taking advantage of ZFS snapshots. ZFS snapshots provides the ability to backup open files in Open Solaris. Amanda 2.6.1alpha OpenSolaris packages that are available for download takes advantage of this feature.  Amanda can also take advantage of ZFS send/recv functionality to do block level backups. Amanda provides users flexibility of backing up ZFS filesystems at file level  as well as block level using ZFS send/recv feature.

ZFS storage is an excellent target for Amanda backups. ZFS’s ease of administration, robustness and scalability makes it an ideal target for disk based backups.

Joe Little of Stanford University has written a blog on how to backup ZFS filesytems using Amanda to Amazon S3.

BTW, ZRM of MySQL already supports Open Solaris and takes advantage of ZFS snapshots for backing up MySQL.

If you are shopping for a backpack for an upcoming trip to Yosemite this fall, chances are you may head over to REI.COM or DicksSportingGoods.com to compare various options and buy the backpack of your choice. On these websites you will also run into extensive reviews to help guide your decision. These reviews are powered by PowerReviews - a fast growing company which provides a platform for online retailers to quickly add consumer reviews functionality to their websites.

When PowerReviews started looking for a backup solution to protect rapidly growing critical data in their environment, they turned to Amanda Enterprise. Today Amanda Enterprise protects 30 Windows and 16 Mac OS X Clients in their environment. Here is the full story.

First, the announcement. On September 21st at 11:30am our VP of engineering Paddy Sreenivasan will talk at OpenSolaris Storage Summit in Santa Clara about Open Source backup software Amanda for OpenSolaris.

Now the news. Sun just published Sun Fire x4540 as Backup Server for Amanda Enterprise backup software quick-start guide on BigAdmin system administration portal. The guide provides an introduction to configuring the Sun Fire X4540 server as a backup server for backup to disk. The specific examples for configuring the zpool and ZFS file systems on the Solaris 10 illustrate how easy it is to provision high-capacity storage for backup to disk. The Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL quick-start guide for X4540 is going through a review and will be published soon as well.

Almost 75% of Fortune 1000 use backup to disk, which requires a lot of capacity. According to the latest ‘08 survey by TheInfoPro of storage administrators working for Fortune 1000 firms, the provisioning continues to be the most time consuming activity, see the figure below:

Ease of provisioning of ZFS volumes with Sun Fire x4540 will be very welcome by many practitioners of backup to disk. For example, right now we are implementing backup to disk for our customer who is the world’s largest supplier of innovative flash memory products. The provisioning of storage for backup is a challenge for their 48 TB of EDA data kept on Solaris servers.

The storage administrators who invest in an easy to use, affordable and scalable (both in capacity and network bandwidth) backup appliance utilizing Amanda Enterprise on x4540, will spend almost no time provisioning storage. I am sure they will find creative ways to spend their free time!
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Dmitri Joukovski