Comparison of ZRM for MySQL Community, Enterprise and Cluster Editions

	Community Edition	Enterprise and Cluster Editions
Which edition should I consider?	A SysAdmin, DBA or MySQL developer who feels comfortable being supported only by Community.	A SysAdmin, DBA or MySQL developer who wants enterprise-strength support and ease of use in production.
Is there a difference in functionality?	Core functionality is the same for all editions. The development effort is focused on providing new functionality as quickly as possible.	Core functionality is the same for all editions. Only Cluster Edition provides support for MySQL Cluster. The focus for Enterprise Edition is on stability, role-based security and ease of use in production environment via the Management Console.
What snapshots are supported for each edition?	Linux LVM and Solaris ZFS snapshots	Linux LVM, Solaris ZFS, Veritas VxFS, Windows VSS, and Network Appliance SnapManager.
What is the Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM)?	Currently available only with Enterprise and Cluster Editions.	The Zmanda Management Console (ZMC) is a web based service integrated with Zmanda Network. It provides management and visualization tools for defining all backup activities of a MySQL DBA: - what to backup, e.g. all databases or just the selected tables - where to store the backup images - when to perform backups, e.g. schedule daily, weekly or monthly full and incremental backups The Management Console provides extensive reporting. The unique Database Events Browser allows : - browsing the contents of incremental backups - searching for keywords in the backups, e.g. identifying the exact time of an important event such as dropping of a table - selecting transaction date and time as recovery point
Where do I get this edition?	Community Downloads.	Available through a paid annual subscription to Zmanda Network.
What kind of support is provided?	Support via forums, wiki, and mailing list. Additional resources (e.g.whitepapers, tutorials) are available to registered users of the Zmanda Network.	Three levels of enterprise-strength technical support, knowledgebase, certified software, functionality and security updates as well as optional professional services and training.
How much does it cost?	No cost.	Annual subscription with simple pricing. Support for snapshot requires additional subscription.
What kind of licensing does it have?	GPL and LGPL	Zmanda commercial license.

Download ZRM Enterprise Datasheet (PDF)

What is ZMC? 

The Zmanda Management Console (ZMC) is a browser based GUI for configuration, management and monitoring. It provides management and visualization tools for defining all backup and recovery activities of a MySQL DBA:

• what to backup, e.g. all databases or just the selected tables
• where to store the backup images
• when to perform backups, e.g. schedule daily, weekly or monthly full and incremental backups
• point-and-click recovery
• The Management Console provides extensive monitoring and reporting.

What is Visual Log Analyzer? 

• Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL has a Database Events Viewer aka Visual Log Analyzer built-in. This lets you visually browse the MySQL binary logs used for incremental backup, and select exactly what point in time you wish to restore. Specifically, it allows:
• browsing the contents of incremental backups
• searching for keywords in the backups, e.g. identifying the exact time of an important event such as dropping of a table
• selecting transaction date and time as recovery point

What kind of backup reports are provided?  

• There are several predefined reports:
• Backup report
• Backup application performance report
• Backup status report
• Backup methods report
• Backup retention policies report
• Backup performance report
• Incremental backup report
• Backup replication report
• Cluster backup report
• In addition to the pre-defined reports, you can create and save for future use highly-customized reports on more than 30 different backup and MySQL parameters.

• For in-depth overview of ZMC reports please review "Zmanda Recovery Manager Guide to MySQL Backup & Recovery" white paper available on Zmanda Network

What compression and encryption are provided with ZRM? 

• ZRM supports compression and encryption of the backup images, using any utility supported by the OS. For example you can use gzip for compression (which is the default). Any utility that reads from standard input (stdin) and writes to standard output (stdout) can be used.

Can ZRM use multiple streams in parallel to backup a database? 

• You can configure ZRM to backup in multiple streams by configuring tables in the database in different backup sets

Can I restore a single database if I configured to backup all databases? 

• Yes, you can restore a single database, but remember that other databases might be needed for referential integrity.

Can I backup a single table in a database? 

• Yes, ZRM allows backup and restore of a single table

Does ZRM allow deselecting corrupted records? 

• ZRM allows selective recovery of consecutive records. You can exclude the corrupted records by recovering consecutive records up to the corrupted one and then running another recovery till the next corrupted record. This approach is acceptable if you have only a few corrupted records.

Can third-party snapshots be integrated with ZRM? 

• Yes, ZRM has very flexible plugable architecture that allows 3rd party snapshot plugins. See this article for details

What is the performance of ZRM? 

• Different backup methods have different performance. Raw backups are 6-10 times faster than logical ones.
• For in-depth overview of backup performance review “Backup and recovery benchmarks for MySQL with ZRM” white paper available on Zmanda Network.

Can I postpone backup if MySQL is under heavy load? 

• Yes, you can deploy special plugin for postponing backups.

What is the dependency of InnoDb during backup process? 

• There is no dependency on storage engines, but we can take advantage on functionality provided with some engines, e.g. we can use mysqlhotcopy as a data extraction utility for MyISAM. Another example — using snapshots with InnoDB can provide truly hot backup of MySQL.

Having a combination of MyISAM and Innodb, do we need separate jobs for backups? 

• You don’t. ZRM is designed to handle variety of MySQL configurations and the same backup job can handle different engines.

If my 20 backups are successful and usually they are, I don’t want 20 emails. I only want an email if it “fails” 

• You may have to tailor the email being sent. This can be done with some scripting. We plan to improve this functionality in the next release of ZRM

When in a replicated environment, can you restore all replicated databases at the same time from one backup? 

• Yes. You should configure all databases in the same backup set.

Can I resume my backup after a failure instead of starting over? 

• If there is backup failure, ZRM uses a different backup method. ZRM uses a hierarchy of backup methods depending on configuration and storage engine in use. Currently we don’t have a built-in checkpoint mechanism to resume a particular failed backup run.

When ZRM is remote to MySQL, what gets installed on the DB - an agent? If so, how lightweight is it? 

• On MySQL server you need to install small footprint software that does data transfer to the ZRM server. This software runs only when needed (during backup run).

From a ZRM standpoint is there any difference backing up a MySQL DB on Linux vs. Windows? 

• For MySQL on Windows we use either logical or hot VSS snapshot backup. For MySQL on Linux we support logical, raw and variety of snapshots.

Does ZRM allow backup to tape? 

• ZRM provides backup to disk. It could be any disk that is accessible by ZRM, e.g. local hard disk, network attached storage NAS, Fibre Channel RAID array, etc.
• Any enterprise media manager such as Amanda Enterprise, Veritas NetBackup or EMC/Legato Networker can make a tape copy of MySQL backup images.

Can I backup MySQL to Amazon S3? 

• ZRM provides backup to disk. It could be any disk that is accessible by ZRM, e.g. local hard disk, network attached storage NAS, Fibre Channel RAID array, etc.
• Amanda Enterprise can move ZRM backup images to Amazon S3.

We run MySQL 24x7 and we can’t afford a read lock even for a second. What should we do for backup? 

• We recommend to take advantage of MySQL replication.
• Stop replication for duration of backup off the slave
• Resume replication.

Storage Engine and OS support

What storage engines are supported? 

• ZRM supports all storage engines. Note that some engines don’t support all backup methods.

Storage	Logical	Raw	Snapshot
MyISAM	Yes (Warm)	Yes (Warm)	Yes (Hot)
InnoDB;	Yes(Warm)	No	Yes (Hot)
NDB(cluster)	No	Yes (Hot)	No
Archive	Yes (Warm)	Yes (Warm)	Yes (Hot)
Falcon	Yes (Warm)	Yes (Hot with new online backup API)	Yes (Hot)

What Operating Systems are supported? 

• ZRM itself can be installed on either a Solaris 10 or a Linux-based server, and can back up MySQL databases running on any Windows or UNIX platform.
• For ZRM on Linux the following backup methods are supported:
• Logical -warm
• Raw - warm
• LVM snapshot - hot
• VxFS snapshot - hot
• NetApp snapshot - hot
• For ZRM on Solaris the following backup methods are supported:
• Logical -warm
• Raw - warm
• ZFS snapshot - hot
• VxFS snapshot - hot
• NetApp snapshot - hot
• For ZRM on Windows the following backup methods are supported:
• Logical -warm
• VSS snapshot - hot
• For ZRM on OS-X and other UNIX the following backup methods are supported:
• Logical -warm

What versions of MySQL are supported? 

• We test with MySQL 4.1.x and MySQL 5.x, but version 4.0 should work also.

ZRM licensing

How is ZRM licensed?  

• ZRM enterprise is sold as an annual subscription per MySQL server and you can backup as many databases as you have on this server.
• You need to buy additional subscriptions to take advantage of VxFS and NetApp snapshots.
• ZRM Cluster edition is sold as an annual subscription per CPU

Competition

How does ZRM compare to InnoDB HotBackup? 

• InnoDB Hotbackup is a utility that provides hot copy of InnoDB storage engine. It is not a backup management solution. In addition to being limited to hot backup of InnoDB engine only, it is missing some vital functionality such as:
• no incremental backups
• no point-in-time recovery
• no scheduling
• no reporting
• no monitoring
• no e-mail notifications
• no GUI
• no enterprise technical support (support via e-mail only with no SLAs)
• ZRM 2.2 provides support for InnoDB Hotbackup so the existing users of InnoDB Hotbackup can take full advantage of enterprise capabilities provided by ZRM.

How is ZRM different from Bakbone or Arkeia offerings? 

• BakBone offering for MySQL is just an add-on module for NetVault backup. You have to buy the expensive NetVault software in addition to the module to protect MySQL data.
• MySQL data is kept in proprietary BakBone format. You will always need a valid BakBone license to recover your own data.
• The module does not take MySQL operational status into consideration. For example, you can not take advantage of near instantaneous backups if snapshots are available.
Another example -- you can not postpone backup if MySQL is under heavy use. The module does not provide reporting on MySQL status either.
• In summary, the module provides a solution for backup administrator who already purchased BakBone software.
• All of the above is applicable to Arkeia as well.

R1Soft claims near continues data protection for MySQL. What is that? 

• Continuous data protection (CDP) means that copy of data is saved every time data changes. The purpose of CDP is the ability to restore data to any point in time. ZRM 2.2 provides CDP functionality for MySQL.
• Near CDP means that multiple recovery points are created allowing to restore to a point in time that is close to the Recovery Point Objective.
• R1 uses proprietary snapshot technology to make multiple snapshots of Linux volumes.
• R1 does not take any advantage of MySQL functionality, and it does not allow recovery to a point-in-time (which is the whole purpose of CDP).
• R1 snapshots are done without locking of MySQL. It means that recovered database might not be consistent. It is extremely risky to perform any storage level backup of the MySQL database without taking at least a momentary read lock at the database level.
• The price starts at $990 for the first MySQL server + $240 for each additional MySQL server. There are no SLAs for support.
• Solution is not open and you can not recover your MySQL data without R1 software.
• In summary, R1 solution is available only for MySQL on Linux and only for very specific versions of Linux kernel (because R1 depends on a kernel level driver). Solution does not take any advantage of functionality provided by MySQL, advanced file systems or storage hardware. R1 deploys proprietary copy-on-write of all changed blocks that requires a lot of additional computing resources, e.g. instead of each single write, R1 does two writes and one read.

Acronis claims bare metal recovery for MySQL. What is that? 

• Bare-metal restore (BMR) means ability to restore a computer from “bare metal” without installing the operating system first. Acronis creates a bootable image of a hard drive that brings the computer to a point in time when image was created (usually once per day).
• Instead of using BMR software many system administrators create a bootable “Master copy of OS and applications” to speed up provisioning of new servers.
• Acronis claims that it is possible, but it does not guarantee recovery to a hardware that is not exactly the same as the original MySQL server.
• BMR solutions are designed to speed up the disaster recovery process for lost server, but they are not optimized to be used as backup for databases such as MySQL. Specifically, Acronis:
• does not guarantee that the recovered MySQL database will be in a consistent state, because it does not take a read lock before performing a storage level backup.
• does not work with any OS other than Linux and Windows
• is not MySQL-aware and does not take any advantage of MySQL functionality such as replication or binary logs. To ensure consistency of MySQL data you have to write your own scripts to suspend and resume MySQL before and after backup image is taken.
• does not provide point-in-time recovery for MySQL.
• In summary, Acronis solution is not for backup of MySQL database, but rather for restoration of a server that happens to run MySQL without understanding how MySQL-specific backups should be done to ensure recoverability of MySQL data.

For more Information on ZRM for MySQL Enterprise and Cluster Editions, Please Contact: