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Best Practices for Oracle 11g Backup and Recovery using RMAN and Dell EqualLogic Snapshots

1 Introduction – key database administration

challenges

Managing Oracle

database backup and recovery is a critical operational requirement for database and

SAN administrators. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) are the key

requirements that influence design of a data protection solution. With increasing database sizes and

stringent SLAs (some requiring 24x7-database availability), IT administrators need to effectively design

and manage data protection solutions to minimize performance impact on production databases

while supporting RPO and RTO requirements.

Below are some of the key operational goals that IT database administrators (DBAs) need to focus on

in Oracle environments:

• Minimize performance impact on the production database when executing backup/restore

operations

• Configure backup tasks to achieve the highest efficiencies and optimal RPOs

• Configure database restore and recovery tasks to achieve optimal RTOs

• Efficiently use all storage, server, and network resources while meeting quality of service (QoS)

requirements

• Minimize DBA/system administrator time requirements for managing backup and recovery

processes

1.1 How this paper can help you meet these challenges

This paper presents frequently used approaches for performing backup and recovery of Oracle

databases using the Oracle provided utilities RMAN (Recovery Manager) and FLASHBACK DATABASE.

We focus on the following topics:

• How IT administrators can use Dell EqualLogic snapshots to complement Oracle RMAN and

FLASHBACK DATABASE features to achieve better RTO and RPO.

• Key results and important observations based on different approaches for database

backup/recovery.

• Basic guidelines and best practices based on the tests results.

Backup and recovery solutions using the following methods are described and tested:

• Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) Full Backup

• Oracle RMAN Incremental Backups

• User-managed disk-to-disk backup and recovery using RMAN and EqualLogic Snapshots

• Point-in-time Recovery using the Oracle FLASHBACK DATABASE feature and using EqualLogic

Snapshots

The combination of the two approaches—RMAN and user-managed backup with EqualLogic

snapshots—offers excellent options for addressing the operational concerns mentioned above. In this

combined approach, snapshots created after placing the production database in hot backup mode are