Slides from Zmanda keynote today (Online MySQL Backup)
April 17th, 2008Final 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)
Wow! What a Great First Day at MySQL UC
April 15th, 2008
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
When: Thursday, April 17, 2008, 10:00 a.m. PT
Where: Santa Clara Convention Center, Ballroom E
In this keynote presentation Zmanda CEO and founder Chander Kant will discuss the most critical task for database administrators - protecting corporate data using online backup and recovery solutions. He will explain how Zmanda enables MySQL DBAs to take advantage of the latest advancements in snapshot technologies and storage engines to take on mission-critical online transaction processing challenges with confidence.
What: “Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL”
Who: Ann Ruckstuhl, Zmanda vice president, sales and marketing
When: Wednesday, April 16 at 5:15 p.m. PT
Where: Santa Clara Convention Center, Ballroom H
Ann Ruckstuhl will present a session on Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL and how DBAs can deploy ZRM to protect their MySQL databases. In this session, Ann will discuss in detail how DBAs can use ZRM to select the right types of backup (e.g. logical, raw, snapshot, full or incremental), optimize backup performance, and activate point-in-time granular recovery right from the MySQL Visual Log Analyzer. She will also outline how ZRM can dramatically simplify and streamline day-to-day backup management tasks via its built-in administration tools, reports, monitoring and alerts.
What: “Top 5 Considerations While Setting up Your MySQL Backup”
Who: Dmitri Joukovski, Zmanda vice president, product management
When: Wednesday, April 16 at 4:25 p.m. PT
Where: Santa Clara Convention Center, Ballroom G
Protecting CFD (and making more money as a MySQL DBA)
April 14th, 2008CFD 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 be very rapid, sometimes with lots of small changes (e.g. tags) or sometimes with big data changes (e.g. addition of user generated media content), very similar to the rather unpredictable viral growth pattern of the Internet.
Many organizations are keen to save and analyze behavior of users as they interact with CFD. This metadata can itself pose a data protection challenge of its own, since it may change very rapidly, while the actual data is not changing (e.g. tracking of customer intelligence metadata about which prospects downloaded which whitepapers from your corporate website, so that you can determine the best marketing & sales approach for these prospects).
MySQL is the DBMS of choice for CFD. Some skeptical press and analysts have said a few times that MySQL is not being deployed at the back-end of the enterprise (financials, billing etc.), but only on the web-tier. The implicit (sometimes explicit) implication being that web-tier applications are less important for the organization. I think this analysis fails to realize the actual importance of the data being stored in web-tier applications. Most of this is CFD, loss of which will cause huge pain and costs in the form of lost revenues, customers and reputation.
From its very inception, Zmanda has been focused on technologies powering CFD (MySQL, LAMP stack, and now increasingly Solaris). We have dug deeper than anyone else in understanding the needs of protecting this crucial part of any organization and very rapidly delivered products to address these needs. We are the data protection company for CFD. While we do protect back-end applications and platforms, our technology and business focus remains CFD.
I will be talking about deploying radically simple backup solutions for CFD on Thursday (April 17th, 10AM) at the MySQL user conference. I am in the unenviable position of making a Backup presentation sound interesting after the Facebook keynote (”A Match Made in Heaven? The Social Graph and the Database”). Well, I guess the point that conference organizers are trying to make is that if you have a radically simple MySQL backup and recovery solution, you will have more time to spend on Facebook!
Speaking of analysts, I recently read an analyst report which indicates that, on average, salaries offered to MySQL DBAs can be up to 40% lower than those offered to Oracle or DB2 DBAs. This ironically is considered one of the barriers for entry of MySQL in some environments. Per this report: higher paid database personnel have vested interest to keep MySQL out. Another claim is that somehow the lower salary to MySQL DBAs reflects the relative importance of the MySQL powered application for the business. Well if you are a MySQL DBA, you will do well to make your management realize that you are the keeper of their Customer Facing Data. Any business deploys its best resources for customer facing activities. Hopefully this will start reflecting on your paycheck soon.
If you would like to talk about your data protection challenges, or your salary as a MySQL DBA, stop by our booth #307 at the MySQL user conference.
Highly Scalable MySQL Backups using Snapshots (ZFS or NetApp)
April 11th, 2008We 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:
- Storage level snapshots - a capability built into ZFS (Solaris), NetApp, LVM (Linux), VxFS, and VSS (Windows)
- Transaction logs generated by MySQL
- 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 NetApp and Zmanda engineers, titled “MySQL Backup and Restore Using Zmanda Recovery Manager and NetApp Snapshot Technology“. This report describes how NetApp Snapshot and Zmanda Recovery Manager can be used to back up and restore a MySQL database for NetApp storage systems. Specifically, this report covers the following topics:
- Infrastructure required to deploy Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL with a NetApp storage system
- Backing up a MySQL database using Zmanda Recovery Manager using NetApp Snapshot plug-in
- Restoring a MySQL database using Zmanda Recovery Manager
Second one is a how-to blog written by Paddy on O’Reilly Databases: MySQL backups using ZFS snapshot. A key observation is sub-second time spent holding the read lock on the database while the snapshot was being taken.
While performing point-in-time recovery of their MySQL databases, DBAs don’t have to search for specific snapshots and manually combine them with database transaction logs. Zmanda Recovery Manager takes care of that behind the covers. DBAs simply key-in (or point-and-click) the timestamp to which they want to recover to.
Amanda 2.6.0 Community Edition Released
April 1st, 2008Today, Amanda community released Amanda 2.6.0. (And no, it is not a April fools joke!). Amanda 2.6.0 represents a huge step forward in Amanda’s evolution - improving ease of installation and configuration, security, scalability and robustness. I am particularly excited about the steps this release is taking to make Amanda a development platform for building advanced backup and archiving applications. First signs of which are Amanda’s support for backing up to Amazon S3, using the new Device API.
Amanda 2.6.0 is available for download both in source and binary form here.
Congratulations to Amanda developers and testers.
MySQL Backup and Recovery Training from Zmanda
March 31st, 2008Worried about Backup and Recovery of your MySQL Databases? MySQL Backup school from Zmanda provides hands on and in depth training on Backup and Recovery of MySQL. Just sign up and show up with your laptop. More information available here.
Amanda at the UM-LUG
March 26th, 2008Tonight, I visited Amanda’s alma mater, University of Maryland at College Park. I spoke at the local linux users’ group, UM-LUG, about Amanda and Amanda development. The group is mostly college students and recent grads, and asked a lot of great questions on a range of topics.
I began with a quick overview of Amanda and its basic structure, then jumped into a look at the new develpoment in Amanda, hilighting the Device API, Application API, Transfer Architecture, and the perl rewrite, and looking at some of the exciting new features each of these projects will enable. The audience was hungry for something a bit more technical, so we dove into the details of Amanda’s new data handling model as an example of the interesting engineering problems we get to solve.
At this point, we transitioned to a discussion mode, and talked about open-source development in general, comparing the communities and development processes of a number of well-known open-source applications: Firefox/Mozilla, Gentoo, Linux Kernel, Python, PHP, and Apache, to name a few. We talked about some of the challenges posed by a commercial entity contributing to an open-source project, and some ways to attract new developers to a project.
Hopefully, some of the attendees will give Amanda a try for their backup needs — the ease and affordability of offsite backups with Amazon S3 was particularly attractive — and perhaps one or two will become Amanda hackers!
Amanda at BaltoLUG
March 24th, 2008Last Tuesday, I spoke at BaltoLUG — the Baltimore Linux Users’ Group — about Amanda. BaltoLUG meetings are fairly informal affairs, so this was more of a conversation about Amanda than a formal presentation.
I gave just enough description of Amanda’s setup and operation to start a discussion about the application’s strengths and weaknesses. We talked about some of the ongoing development and bandied about a few ideas about new applications or devices. Although this was a small audience of mostly non-programming admins, I hope I piqued someone’s interest in Amanda’s future, and encouraged some new users.
Sun/MySQL to resell Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL
March 18th, 2008Today Sun and Zmanda announced our agreement to deliver a comprehensive, global data backup and recovery solution for MySQL Enterprise subscribers. Starting April 1st, MySQL Enterprise customers will be able to purchase ZRM for MySQL directly from Sun worldwide.
I think Zack’s comment in the press release captures the rationale for the deal:
“Protecting corporate data through effective backup and recovery is one of the most crucial tasks for a database administrator, and it can be a complex undertaking — especially for today’s large Web-scale applications,” said Zack Urlocker, VP of products, Sun Microsystems database group. “MySQL users have told us that global backup and recovery is very important to them, and we are thrilled that we can now offer ZRM for MySQL as an easy-to-use solution for protecting all of their MySQL data.”
Of course, at Zmanda we are thrilled as well. Sun’s sales channels will give us the opportunity to make MySQL Backups radically simple for ever increasing MySQL installations around the world.
Webinar: New Levels of Backup and Recovery for MySQL
March 12th, 2008Zmanda has introduced a new version of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) which adds quite a few capabilities for MySQL users. Version 2.1 includes enhanced snapshot support that enables backup without application downtime or interruption to online data access. Version 2.1 also has global management of backups so that you can manage all your MySQL backup jobs from a single graphical console. You can now run the entire ZRM solution on Solaris as well as on Linux.
Join us for an overview and a live demo of ZRM 2.1 on Thursday 3/20 at 10am PST. Click here to register.
