Backup/Recovery & Media Management Tools

I'm currently evaluating backup and recovery tools for our Sequent/Dynix Oracle 7.x environment. We need to fully automate our backup and recovery procedures and will probably be looking at third party media management products. We are relatively "small" for now, under 30 GB for all of our instances. In the future the environment will be clustered and using OPS.

I just read an excellent white paper from Oracle Corp. called "Oracle Parallel Backup/Restore Utility" (October 1995). This product, which will be shipped with the database, is intended for high end backup/recovery. Apparently the product is ready but won't be out until the December 1995 to February 1996 timeframe.

A number of third party media management products (Epoch's EpochBackup, SpectraLogic's Alexandria, HP's Omniback II, Legato System's NetWorker, and StorageTek REEL) can be integrated with the Backup/Restore Utilities API.

Another backup/recovery tool that I looked at was DataTools's SQL BackTrack. Functionally it sounded outstanding but may not be ported to Sequent/Dynix until some time next year. Its support of parallel backup/recovery and recovery guide (steps you through your recovery) made it sound like the right tool.

Questions:

What other tools should I be looking at to speed up and automate our backup/recovery?

Does anyone have any beta experience with "OBACKUP" (Oracle Parallel Backup/Recovery)?

What requirements were critical to your organization's success?

Do you have any pointers in specifying media management tools so that I can pass them on to the sys admin?
(i.e. must work with dat stackers, etc.)

Thanks to all who respond. I'll post my findings regarding these tools and others (monitoring/diagnostics, reorganization utilities, SQL analyzers) when I have finished my evaluations. Very labor intensive...

Rick Ellison

Oracle System DBA Received on Thu Oct 26 1995 - 00:00:00 CET