Veritas-bu

[Veritas-bu] Backing up Thousands of Databases

2003-11-17 09:06:46
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Backing up Thousands of Databases
From: Mark.Donaldson AT experianems DOT com (Donaldson, Mark)
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2003 07:06:46 -0700
We're nowhere as near the DB count you have but we do use one policy for all
our database backups.  I have multiple schedules within that policy that
define different storage units.  We've decided on a consistent retention
time so all the schedules have the same.  Multiple schedules are just to
choose the storage unit.

I don't see any reason to create a policy for each DB or, for that matter,
for each server.  

$.02
-M

-----Original Message-----
From: markjessup AT northwesternmutual DOT com
[mailto:markjessup AT northwesternmutual DOT com]
Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2003 10:44 AM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Cc: briandiven AT northwesternmutual DOT com; markjessup AT northwesternmutual 
DOT com
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Backing up Thousands of Databases


Hi All,


I am wondering what method or strategy people use for backing up
application databases such as sybase, oracle, or db2. We have over 1500
databases in
our shop and are in the middle of migrating to Netbackup Datacenter from
an older mainframe based system. We currently use the Netbackup database
extension for each flavor of database out there, Sybase, Oracle, and UDB
so we are doing hot online backups.  We backup each individual database
and the way we have it set up today is with a separate Netbackup policy
for each database dump and also for the database log dump. This method
has introduced over 1200 policies to Netbackup so far and it has caused
performance issues when expanding the policy tree in the Windows Admin
console. It takes us over 3 minutes to bring up the initial policy list.
The bigger issues is that with each database being a separate policy, we
lose almost all control over backup management because all of the
database backups are not part of a single policy but are individual
policies. With this method, we also experience status 58, 202, and 205
errors alot nightly because each database backup which is a separate
policy can go back to the same physical Unix client so we could have
many, many database backup jobs trying to run and connect to the same
Unix database server at the same time and then trying to communicate
back to our media server. This is all being done within Netbackup's
internal
scheduler with hot backups to disk or tape based on the size of the
database.  We have increased kernal parameters, introduced local DNS
cachin, etc with
little improvement on the status 58, 202, 205 when Netbackup does the
scheduling.  We have the default of 10 mintues set for the scheduler
interval. I was
wondering how other big database shops backup application databases,
what process or method and how you schedule them and monitor the
database backup jobs.
Also, is this process supported by the central backup team or by the
database admin team for these application database backup jobs. 


Any feedback, ideas, or thoughts on this topic or what I described above
regarding our current process would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!





Mark Jessup
Northwestern Mutual 





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