Total Data Storage Management for Oracle E-Business

Transcription

1 Total Data Storage Management for Oracle E-Business Solution Series for Oracle: 1 of 5

2 Table of Contents The E-Business Challenge VERITAS Delivers Business Continuance Today and Tomorrow When the Data Is the Business Addressing the Complexity of Modern Storage Systems Storage Management Objectives VERITAS Solutions Level 1: Building a Solid Foundation Level 2: Maintaining and Increasing Data Integrity Level 3: Creating a Highly Available Environment Cost Effectively Level 4: Ensuring E-Business Viability No Matter What VERITAS: The Foundation for E-Business Future Overview: VERITAS Solutions Mentioned in this Brochure VERITAS Enterprise Consulting Services Total Data Storage Management for Oracle E-Business Page 1

3 The E-Business Challenge From emerging dot-com companies to corporations looking to establish direct customer relationships or do enterprise resource planning the opportunities for e-businesses are tremendous. So are the challenges for IT organizations tasked with protecting the organization s data. There is a new urgency to avoiding downtime when each hour represents a potential loss of tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. Even a few minutes of business data being unavailable to customers and end users may result in large amounts of lost revenue and business opportunity, in addition to negative publicity and a damaged reputation. Traditional storage management concepts are complicated by expectations of 24xforever availability, explosive growth, and spreading of data across different server platforms. Often these heterogeneous software and hardware platforms, run and maintained by exhausted corporate IT departments, are strained to their breaking point in delivering the levels of service that e-businesses demand. For many valid reasons, a large number of e-business data managers have turned to Oracle as a reliable and well-proven database management system. Oracle has the necessary stability and transactional framework needed in an e-business environment. To be fully successful, it needs to be backed by an underlying infrastructure that Supports a robust, high performance data storage environment Scales with the growth of the business Ensures continuous availability of critical data Enables backup and other storage management functions during database operations Is, unlike proprietary hardware solutions, fully Oracle-aware VERITAS Delivers Business Continuance Today and Tomorrow VERITAS is the world leader in the business of supplying this type of robust infrastructure to enterprises. VERITAS has a well established and very fruitful relationship with Oracle. The two companies have in recent years increased their joint efforts in bringing effective solutions to customers. At the forefront of emerging developments, they have strongly focused on being responsive to the needs of the e-business community. The total data storage management approach, as developed by VERITAS, makes it possible for Page 2

4 e-business customers to enjoy uninterrupted business continuance with full protection, accessibility and manageability of enterprise data at all times. VERITAS has the innovative technology, experience and support system, combined with the capability to deliver consistently, to empower e-business enterprises to accomplish their goals and remain competitive. But VERITAS solutions do more than help a business be viable. Through their high levels of manageability, automation and heterogeneity, they make it possible for an enterprise to maximize resource usage, increase the value of the investment in technology, and keep administrative overhead low. This is especially crucial in the e-business arena, where resources need to be dedicated to the efforts of innovation and proactive customer relations management. When the Data Is the Business In earlier days of computing, storage devices were considered peripherals to computer systems, in the same manner that workstations were seen as peripherals before the development of local area network and client-server computing. Until recently, interconnection technology has restricted the distance over which storage devices can be attached and the number of hosts and devices that can be connected. This has caused the peripheral view of storage to persist, despite the fact that companies now invest more in storage resources than computing resources. With the emergence of fibre channel and other new storage interconnection technologies we entered into a very different phase of technology. Storage systems, and the data that reside on them, are central elements not only of information systems, but are also at the very core of what allows e-business to exist. Without the data, there would be no business left. Managing and maintaining data storage, protection and access is the most crucial task in these enterprises. Given the critical need for data availability in the e-business environment, effective disaster recovery has become mandatory. Businesses that don t build the necessary safeguards suffer dramatic consequences. Even if they manage to survive or reopen after a data loss event, there is still a high probability that negative customer relations and publicity will ruin them. Total Data Storage Management for Oracle E-Business Page 3

5 Addressing the Complexity of Modern Storage Systems Modern storage systems consist of many components, including software such as file systems, volume managers, device drivers, backup and recovery tools, and hardware subsystems that include complex software components to implement RAID and other advanced storage management functions. Recently, very much driven by e-business, storage area networks (SANs) have become a flexible and high-powered avenue to bring mainframe class storage management functionality to modern open systems environments. By virtualizing the management of physical storage devices and applications through centralization and automation, fibre channel-based SAN technology makes it possible to manage the cost and logistics of fast growth and increasing complexity of devices. VERITAS is engineering its entire product line to fully exploit the potential of storage area networks, and also builds SAN-specific new solutions to improve the manageability and effectiveness of this complex environment. E-business will usually find that hardware and software components are provided by a variety of vendors. Each component typically comes with its own management interface and may or may not expose its functional behavior to data managers. In addition, system administrators can usually not readily obtain insight into the I/O access patterns of applications running on the systems under their control. These factors make the management of storage systems for optimal availability, cost and performance more difficult than ever before. In what follows, we talk about some of the VERITAS products and technologies that make it possible to manage storage for Oracle databases for maximum availability and performance, while keeping administrative overhead, including the cost of installing and mastering new software systems, at an acceptable low point. Storage Management Objectives Before moving on to VERITAS solutions, let s take a look at what data storage management needs to do. There are several important and closely related objectives for Oracle e-business organizations, and not all of them are the same, or have the same priority, as in other enterprises. Ensuring data availability and protecting information assets The most important goal of storage management is to protect data against loss that may be the result of many causes, including hardware failures, Page 4

6 human errors, software failures or disastrous events. At the same time, data managers need to bring the loss of access to data down to zero. When both planned and unplanned unavailability are to be avoided, it becomes necessary to shrink backup windows and recovery times, and to perform backup and other storage management tasks online. Data protection measures will need to have minimal impact on network clients. To that end, they should not burden the application servers with high I/O or computing overhead. Disaster recovery after a potential data loss event needs to be fast, easy to perform, and return all business data and computing functions with negligible impact on production. Enhancing performance of e-business applications To network clients and customers alike, fast and smooth performance is very important. In what is maybe the most competitive business environment in existence today, any advantage in speed and performance translates immediately into a memorable distinction in the customers perception. Data managers have to maximize I/O performance and increase the speed at which data can be accessed. They need to optimize database I/O policies for a given application and storage configuration. They are also held to configure storage in a manner that is optimal for the I/O access patterns generated by the Oracle e-business application. It is not enough for data protection and management tools to execute consistently and reliably they also need to produce maximum performance. Reducing total cost of systems ownership to fully leverage technology investments E-business applications in an Oracle environment generate an amount of data that is many times larger than it was in high intensity computing operations just a few years ago. Businesses cannot afford to allow technology to simply accommodate this growth, but must keep their infrastructural and operational costs down. There are many ways data storage management can drive this effort. They include using disks and storage media as effectively as possible, reducing I/O overhead, implementing automated, centralized and policy-driven operations, and minimizing the need for IT staff to administrate data management outside of exceptions. That also means software solutions need to be easy to learn and use to be fully accepted by system managers and end users. Total Data Storage Management for Oracle E-Business Page 5

7 Having the flexibility and scalability to adopt advanced storage architectures and grow with the business Depending on what statistician you listen to, e-business is likely to at least double every year over the next five years. It needs to be able to rely on a data management infrastructure that can include new business and technological developments. Data management must take advantage of SAN architecture and be receptive to newly emerging standards. It also needs to be scalable enough to support e-business from a startup to a leading global enterprise with the same consistent integrity, manageability and protection of critical corporate data. Page 6

8 VERITAS Solutions As we discuss e-business solutions built by VERITAS, we will find that, while they have their areas of focus, they will to differing degrees address each of the objective categories we just named. VERITAS developers create each product with scalability, cost-effectiveness, high performance and consistent data protection in mind. LEVEL 1: BUILDING A SOLID FOUNDATION The Role of File and Volume Management in Ensuring Data Availability One of the basic issues in handling large and growing databases, quite common to any e-business environment, is the need to overcome the physical and performance limitations of disk storage and manage data volumes independently from the actual conditions of disks and drives. To ensure data continuity, the management of data volumes needs to be able to run as a background function without users having to go offline. Such logical online volume management effectively removes physical limitations of storage, enabling administrators to achieve higher performance, build more available storage configurations from existing disk storage, and simplify disk administration tasks, thereby reducing the cost of systems ownership as well. The volume manager software also helps to overcome disk and I/O bottlenecks and failures. Volume managers such as VERITAS Volume Manager can use a number of techniques to increase the availability and integrity of business data. For example, they can partition a large disk into smaller volumes, concatenate or stripe the storage capacity of several disks to appear as one large volume, mirror identical copies of data on two or more disks, and work with hostbased RAID to protect against data loss due to disk failure. Since this technology allows for growth in small increments, it uses disk resources very efficiently, helping to keep costs low. VERITAS Volume Manager is a very feature-rich solution. It can mirror data across portions of two or more disks, across two or more entire disks, or across two or more multi-disk sets. This makes it very easy to add storage capacity without interrupting production. Total Data Storage Management for Oracle E-Business Page 7

9 While VERITAS Volume Manager provides a robust, high performing foundation for e-business databases, VERITAS File System goes beyond traditional file systems to add high performance, flexible, manageable data containers that are ideal for database tables and indexes. VERITAS File System is extent-based, meaning that it allocates storage space in extents of variable lengths, whereas traditional UNIX file systems work only with allocation units of fixed length. VERITAS File System can thus describe large contiguous storage areas with very little structural overhead. It supports large files, not at all uncommon in e-business environments, of up to two terabytes in size. Growing, defragmenting and reorganizing the file system can be done online. Enhancing Performance of E-Business Applications E-business applications are typically I/O request intensive. They make large numbers of I/O requests per second, but each request only transfers a few kilobytes. The order in which application requests occur is unpredictable, so an e-business database management system accesses its storage randomly. I/O intensive applications can be caused to perform better by caching data in solid state memory, or adding disks and balancing the I/O load across them. There is still a relatively high risk of application failure in this intense environment. VERITAS Volume Manager aggregates physical disks into virtual volumes that can survive disk and I/O bus failures. In addition, the combination of extent-based architecture and pre-allocation of storage space by VERITAS File System allows another feature that makes file systems perform like raw partitions VERITAS Quick I/O for Databases. Quick I/O for Databases enables a database management system to do I/O to pre-allocated files as if they were UNIX character devices. I/O is performed directly between the database management s memory space and disks. Efficiency is equivalent to that of I/O on raw disk partitions. Caching data in memory to improve the performance of I/O request intensive applications works well for reading from a database, since data can be read into cache once and delivered to applications multiple times. However, a 32-bit database management system can only address four gigabytes of memory. A large database can easily use more than this amount to cache data. VERITAS Cached Quick I/O addresses this problem by writing data directly from the database management system cache to disk. At the same time, data is copied to the operating system s buffer cache and subsequent reads are made from this cache at the speed of memory. Page 8

10 LEVEL 2: MAINTAINING AND INCREASING DATA INTEGRITY Protecting Information Assets: E-Business Backup Strategies Backing up business data needs to be a routine aspect of e-business computing functions, and should ideally be integrated with an overall disaster recovery strategy that covers any eventuality. Backups must be managed in such a way that they are not disruptive, incur only minimal overhead, use resources efficiently, are not vulnerable to operator errors and, most importantly, are Oracle-aware. Administrators need to plan how often data is to be backed up, set up a schedule for full and incremental backups and media rotations, and rehearse recovery procedures periodically if they should ever need them in a real emergency. VERITAS NetBackup is one of our most robust and widely used solutions. It has a rich array of features that allow data protection activities to proceed at a high level of automation combined with effective centralization and manageability. As a robust data management, backup and recovery solution, VERITAS NetBackup for Oracle is fully Oracle-aware. Through Oracle s RMAN interface, NetBackup can provide both offline and online backups. In addition, it can run multiple backups simultaneously and multiplex the backup streams to keep high-speed storage devices running at capacity. VERITAS NetBackup for Oracle manages all of the backup information required for a successful restore, including information stored outside the database such as archived redo logs, Oracle control and configuration files. On recovery, the RMAN utility determines which files are required and interacts with NetBackup to restore the appropriate data. If a backup or recovery process fails for any reason, it can be restarted at the point of failure. Duplication options let administrators create a second backup copy for offsite storage. If the backup media is multiplexed, it can be duplicated, or converted into a non-multiplexed image. Block Level Incremental Backup (BLIB) When only a small portion of an Oracle database changes on a daily basis, full database backups are very costly in terms of time and media resources. The capability of performing block level incremental backups reduces the required backup time and media, but also measurably decreases CPU and network overhead during backups. VERITAS NetBackup for Oracle Advanced BLI Agent enables highly performing time-saving incremental Total Data Storage Management for Oracle E-Business Page 9

11 backups. It also enhances data availability by its full integration capability with Oracle s Recovery Manager (RMAN). VERITAS BLIB technology is unique in that it incorporates VERITAS File System Storage Checkpoint technology, which tracks changes to data in real time. The Advanced BLI Agent works at the file system level with 2K data blocks to back up any identified changes. This high level of granularity adds to the speed and efficiency of backups. Another benefit of the Storage Checkpoint facility identifying small changed blocks in real time is that the BLIB function does not need to search the entire database for modified blocks. This again reduces backup time and system overhead. The Advanced BLI Agent thus makes it possible to bypass the limitations of more traditional approaches to incremental backup that may track changes in blocks of 8K or larger, and rely on a sequential, time-consuming scan of the entire database in order to identify them. A cost analysis will also demonstrate that this software-focused BLIB solution achieves its impressive backup and recovery performance improvements at a fraction of the cost of split third mirror hardware solutions. No special new hardware is necessary for implementation. BLIB from VERITAS is not only the first, but also the only file system-based backup solution that brings block level incremental backup to Oracle databases. While BLIB makes use of the Storage Checkpoint and Rollback features of VERITAS File System, these features by themselves can be highly advantageous for online data protection of Oracle data. For the relatively frequent errors and recoveries consequent to deleted data files, batch updates that corrupt the database, and dropped tables or tablespaces, they give an added level of protection that allows data managers to expeditiously keep operations and data integrity intact. The VERITAS Database Edition for Oracle integrates and combines VERITAS File System, VERITAS Volume Manager and VERITAS NetBackup Advanced BLI Agent in one cost-effective package that makes full use of all enhancements that come to bear when the products are deployed together. While they are available and fully functional separately, the Database Edition leverages the technology for consistent high performance, full data integrity and an increased return on investment. The Database Edition also lowers administrative overhead, learning curve and adoption cycles in comparison to the standalone solutions. LEVEL 3 Creating a Highly Available Environment Cost Effectively Page 10

12 LEVEL 3: CREATING A HIGHLY AVAILABLE ENVIRONMENT - COST EFFECTIVELY Optimizing E-Business Application Availability Clustering technology is most often used to enhance application availability and scaling. If one server in a cluster fails or an application goes down, operations can fail over to another server. All servers are connected to the same data storage devices and clients. If network links fail, clients can use an alternate path to a server and continue to function. Clustering also adds additional capacity if application overhead reaches a critical threshold. To safeguard the availability of critical data if the entire data center should experience an interruption, clustering is ideally implemented together with replication strategies to allow the data replicated to a remote site allow the business to carry on. At that site, clustering again should be in place for increased data availability. VERITAS Cluster Server has been successfully demonstrated to enable failover among 32 Solaris, Windows NT or HP-UX servers. For certain applications, VERITAS Cluster Server enables multiple instances to execute on different computers in a cluster, increasing total throughput beyond the capacity of any single computer. VERITAS Cluster Server thus implements a robust application execution environment for e-business in which nearly continuous service to clients can be provided, even if an entire system fails. The VERITAS clustering solution, then, can provide application scaling to multiple Oracle servers, with the surviving servers picking up the workload in the event of application server failure. The coordination of shared access to data is managed through the use of a third tier in the computing hierarchy, a database server tier, running, for example, Oracle Parallel Server. The VERITAS Database Edition /HA for Oracle supports high availability e-business Oracle operations by adding VERITAS Cluster Server and a specially built VERITAS Cluster Server Agent for Oracle to the integrated suite of products mentioned above. The HA version of the Database Edition enables data managers to implement clustering with failover to another system in case of server failure, making sure that production can continue. Total Data Storage Management for Oracle E-Business Page 11

13 Increasing Efficiency, Reducing Costs of Data Storage After an e-business has operated for a period of time, some of its online data may be infrequently accessed. Many types of e-business data have natural lifetimes beyond which keeping them online no longer makes economic sense. For regulatory or business practice reasons, these data still have value and must be retained. Needless to say, keeping infrequently accessed data objects online degrades disk and database performance. VERITAS Storage Migrator allows the policy-driven automated moving of data objects between active online storage and inactive storage or lower cost forms of storage such as tape or optical disk. Storage Migrator uses an administrator-designed hierarchy of media, bandwidths, access rates and relevance of data that allows data managers to be highly flexible in setting up effective data management. Many e-businesses may find it useful to subdivide this storage application hierarchy according to business needs. For example, it might be appropriate to store billing archives on optical disks, because they are typically accessed randomly in response to customer calls. On the other hand, it might be more appropriate to store archival sales records on tape, because these tend to be accessed in bulk for occasional data mining. VERITAS Storage Migrator supports a range of storage technologies that allow it to meet any e-business data storage requirement profile. Pre-migration disk files, bulk magnetic disks, various magnetic tape technologies, optical disks, and remote sites using FTP are all supported as storage classes. Storage Migrator can share optical disk and tape drives and media pools with VERITAS NetBackup, so that one set of devices, media pools and administrative policies can serve both backup and hierarchical storage management needs. Page 12

14 LEVEL 4: ENSURING E-BUSINESS VIABILITY - NO MATTER WHAT Going Global: Data Replication for Disaster Recovery In a typical e-business, growth will soon create a need for multiple processing sites. The responsiveness requirements of customers, suppliers, and employees usually make it most efficient to locate information close to where it is used. If information is to be made available from multiple sites, data must be replicated, or published, to those sites. It is important that this data is identical everywhere in the organization. Changes must therefore be synchronized expeditiously across all locations. Data is also frequently replicated for data mining, which is very I/O intensive and tends to slow down operations. Data can be replicated to another server to allow this activity to go on without impacting production. Possibly the most important reason to replicate data is for their use in disaster recovery. Any business needs to be able to recover quickly from a data loss event and reduce its consequences for users and customers. E-business is faced with higher expectations than most other industries; any downtime at all is an immediate and major risk to business continuance. Replication technology keeps one or more alternate, up to date sets of Oracle databases and other business data available. VERITAS replication solutions technologies, such as VERITAS File Replicator or VERITAS Volume Replicator, can replicate either from a primary file system to one or more secondary file systems on different computers, or from a primary volume group to one or more secondary volume groups on different computers. Both file and volume group replicators are designed to fully maintain the integrity of replicated data in the event of network or system outages. Since replicated objects are file systems or volumes, all VERITAS Foundation features, including availability enhancements like mirroring, and performance enhancements such as Quick I/O for Databases, can be used in conjunction with data replication. Replication is entirely policy-based and thus responsive to business needs. Replication will incur an additional hardware investment. However, it allows an e-business enterprise to resume operations very rapidly after what could have been a catastrophic event that left one of its data centers incapacitated, which will more than justify the initial expense. Total Data Storage Management for Oracle E-Business Page 13

15 VERITAS: the Foundation for E-Business Future VERITAS, The Data Availability Company, is the world s largest software solutions provider for data management and protection. It is also a prominent and highly respected innovator. VERITAS is taking a proactive leadership role in the setting of industry standards for SANs and other new technologies, which will directly reflect on the interoperability of software and hardware choices available to data managers. E-business clients are also likely to benefit from the processes of continuous customer-oriented improvement practiced at VERITAS. The available software solutions cover all aspects of data management in this challenging and highly competitive business environment. They are backed up by highly experienced and flexible services that help you to plan and implement effective data protection and management with minimal financial and administrative overhead. VERITAS delivers the complete data infrastructure, leaving you to focus your resources on your business goals. Page 14

16 Overview: VERITAS Solutions Mentioned in this Brochure VERITAS Database Edition for Oracle An optimized, integrated suite that brings together VERITAS File System, VERITAS Volume Manager, VERITAS NetBackup Advanced BLI Agent for optimal performance and data integrity in an Oracle e-business environment. VERITAS Database Edition for Oracle /HA (High Availability) An optimized, integrated solution suite for high availability of e-business environments, combining VERITAS File System, VERITAS Volume Manager, VERITAS NetBackup Advanced BLI Agent, VERITAS Cluster Server and VERITAS Cluster Server Agent for Oracle. VERITAS File System for Oracle A high performance, flexible and manageable file system solution that is ideal for Oracle databases. VERITAS Volume Manager An online volume management solution that overcomes physical storage limitations for a highly effective production environment. VERITAS Quick I/O for Databases A feature of VERITAS File System that increases performance by allowing file systems to work like raw partitions. VERITAS Cached Quick I/O for Databases A feature of VERITAS File System that transcends memory limitations by writing data directly from the DBMS cache to disk. VERITAS NetBackup The powerful, industry leading, fully Oracle-aware data protection solution. VERITAS NetBackup for Oracle Advanced BLI Agent A highly effective solution for block level incremental backup using the Storage Checkpoint function of VERITAS File System. VERITAS Cluster Server A clustering solution to ensure e-business continuance if an Oracle server fails. Total Data Storage Management for Oracle E-Business Page 15

17 VERITAS Storage Migrator A cost-saving data storage management tool that migrates less frequently used data to secondary storage. VERITAS File Replicator A replication solution optimized for Oracle e-business file systems to enable global data recovery. VERITAS Volume Replicator A replication solution for Oracle data volumes that allows e-business to carry on even if an entire site fails. For more information on VERITAS e-business solutions for Oracle environments, go to our website at Page 16

18 VERITAS Enterprise Consulting Services A market research firm, the META Group, reports that the cycle time for implementing new business processes has gone from 5-7 years in the 70s and 80s to less than 12 months today. Through delivery of a comprehensive mix of technical expertise, industry knowledge, and experience, VERITAS Enterprise Consulting helps ensure rapid implementation of our application storage management software. Our highly qualified consultants offer services ranging from needs assessment and planning, to installation, implementation, troubleshooting and custom application design. VERITAS works closely with Oracle and is involved in many joint programs, including the VOS Foundation Services a line of consulting services offered in conjunction with Oracle and Sun Microsystems, Inc., to create new standards for quality and interoperability among the industry leading vendors in e-business. Total Data Storage Management for Oracle E-Business Page 17

19 VERITAS Software Corporation Corporate Headquarters 1600 Plymouth Street Mountain View, CA For additional information about VERITAS, its products, or the location of an office near you, please call our corporate headquarters or visit our website at VER09-ORASOL-0000 Copyright 2000 VERITAS Software. All rights reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS SOFTWARE, the VERITAS logo, Business Without Interruption, VERITAS, The Data Availability Company, VERITAS Database Edition, VERITAS File System, VERITAS Volume Manager, VERITAS Quick I/O, VERITAS Cached Quick I/O, VERITAS NetBackup, VERITAS Cluster Server, VERITAS Storage Migrator, VERITAS File Replicator, and VERITAS Volume Replicator are trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and other countries. Other product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Printed in USA. September 2000.