Oracle RMAN 11g Backup and Recovery (61 page)

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The Oracle Secure Backup Cloud Module

The OSB Cloud Module is a media management library (MML) for Recovery Manager (RMAN) that allows backups to be written directly to Amazon.com’s Simple Storage Service (S3) over the Internet as if it were a tape library. S3 is a component of Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s
cloud
computing
platform.

Cloud computing, an emerging infrastructure model being pioneered by Amazon.com and others, offers a viable alternative to both physical hosting infrastructure and offsite data storage.

The cloud backup model addresses many of the drawbacks of traditional backups. Additionally, storing backups in a cloud storage service offers several potential advantages.

What Is Cloud Computing?

The term
cloud computing
suffers from having been appropriated for use by numerous technology vendors to apply in various ways to their own products or services. This diffusion of the term’s meaning has led to confusion among many in the technology field.

Generally, cloud computing refers to a remote pool of storage and computing resources available to the public over the Internet at as small or as large a scale as users require. The cloud resources of one user are discrete and secure from those of other users. Users manage cloud resources using a uniform, published software API (application program interface). A computing cloud conforms to set availability and performance service levels published by the provider.

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More simply, from a user’s perspective, a computing cloud is an Internet service on which users can deploy applications and services on professionally managed enterprise-class infrastructure.

In the case of Google, software such as visualization and mapping tools are available to be integrated into a user’s web pages or applications as a component.

In the case of Amazon, users can deploy virtual server hosts and virtual storage. From the perspective of the users and applications, cloud services look and behave similarly to stand-alone server and storage equipment.

Oracle and the Amazon Cloud

Oracle and Amazon.com have worked together to provide a way to deploy several components of Oracle technology on
Amazon Web Services
(AWS), Amazon.com’s cloud computing platform.

Currently, Oracle supports two classes of services on AWS:

■ Running Oracle software on AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

■ Backing up Oracle databases to AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Amazon EC2 and EBS allow users to deploy virtual hosts running Windows or Linux and highly available volume storage to support virtually any application that runs on those operating systems.

EC2 provides virtual hosts, and EBS provides storage volumes.

Simple Storage Service (S3)—Oracle’s Cloud

Backup Solution

Yet another component of Amazon’s cloud is S3, a low-cost, reliable, redundant mass-storage service. Popular software packages such as Jungle Disk use S3 as an inexpensive way to back up your personal computer or just to get some extra storage space. Oracle has followed suit, providing the Oracle Secure Backup (OSB) Cloud Module, an RMAN media management library (MML) for S3. The OSB Cloud Module allows Oracle databases on the Amazon Cloud
and at
customer sites,
to back up directly to S3 on the Amazon cloud from RMAN.

RMAN Backup to S3: The Oracle Secure Backup

Cloud Module

The OSB Cloud Module is essentially a media management library (MML) that provides access to Amazon S3 storage via the SBT channel interface of RMAN. Just as with tape MMLs, the OSB

Cloud Module is implemented as a shared library for Linux/Unix and as a DLL for Windows.

The OSB Cloud Module is available for Oracle versions 9
i
and higher on 32- and 64-bit Linux, 32-bit Windows, and Solaris (SPARC 64-bit). Oracle has offered to port it to any other Unix upon customer request.

S3 Backup over the Internet or from Amazon EC2

A database hosted elsewhere than on Amazon Web Services can back up over the public Internet to S3. As such, performance may be variable. In contrast, a database hosted on AWS can back up to S3 over Amazon’s internal network, where performance will be predictably good.

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Part II: Setup Principles and Practices

For Amazon cloud-hosted databases, the decision to use the OSB Cloud Module is easy. It is a cheap, reliable way to store backups. It is also among the only options for cloud-hosted databases.

For databases hosted elsewhere than AWS, such as in the customer’s own datacenter, it is necessary to determine first whether acceptable speed and performance can be achieved. This is discussed later in this chapter.

Oracle Cloud Backup Advantages

There are several benefits to using cloud backup instead of local or offsite disk or tape storage.

Chief among these are

■
No up-front equipment costs
Tape libraries and mass storage arrays are major capital expenses and require ongoing maintenance and upkeep. When physical storage capacity is exceeded, new equipment must be purchased and deployed. In contrast, deploying backups on cloud storage is affordable and requires no additional equipment, even as scale increases.

■
Low ongoing storage costs
As of Q3 2009, Amazon S3 costs 15¢ per GB per month for storage and 1¢/GB for data transfer into the service. So daily backup of a 100GB

database plus 20GB of archive logs would cost about $162 per month.

■
Elasticity
With cloud computing, you can use as few or as many resources as you need.

As requirements grow, there is no need to replace equipment such as tape libraries with new equipment of larger capacity.

■
Reliability
Amazon provides redundancy and availability within their internal architecture and meets a published SLA (service-level agreement) of 99.99 percent availability for S3. One of the key features of S3 is geographic replication. S3 replicates data to three availability zones within an Amazon Web Services region. Availability zones are analogous to separate datacenters. Similar redundancy and availability within a customer’s own datacenter would have to be architected as part of an enterprise backup infrastructure at significant expense and effort.

■
Time to recovery
Unlike offsited tapes, which must be ordered and loaded into libraries, RMAN backups to Amazon S3 are always online and available for recoveries.

■
No third-party MML license costs
The Oracle Secure Backup Cloud Module is licensed through Oracle and is priced per channel. That means that customers can leverage their preexisting license relationship with Oracle.

RMAN Workshop:
Deploying RMAN Backups to Amazon S3

Workshop Notes

A few prerequisites and credentials are required to use the OSB Cloud Module:

■ An oracle.com single sign-on account (the same one used to log into the Oracle Technology Network)

■ An Amazon Web Services account

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Step 1.
Establish an Oracle single sign-on account, if needed. If you already have an Oracle.com or Oracle Technology Network account, you can skip this step. Otherwise:
a.

In a browser
, navigate to http://www.oracle.com/admin/account.

Click
Create your Oracle account now
.

Step 2.
Establish an Amazon Web Services account:

In a browser
, navigate to http://aws.amazon.com.

Click
Sign Up Now
. You will be prompted to sign into Amazon.com. Your AWS

account is accessed via your Amazon.com retail account. If you do not have an existing account at Amazon.com, select
I am a new customer
.

Once you are logged in, you must check a box and click
Continue
to accept the terms of the AWS Customer Agreement.

Step 3.
When you successfully establish an account with AWS, you still need to sign up for Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3):

In a browser
, navigate to http://aws.amazon.com/s3.

Click
Sign up for Amazon s3
.

On subsequent web pages, Amazon will prompt you to provide a credit card for payment and a billing address. Finally, you will be prompted to review your selections and to click
Complete Sign Up
.

Step 4.
To store and retrieve data on S3, you will need your private access identifiers. The link to obtain these values should be sent to you in an e-mail from Amazon.com upon signing up for Amazon S3. If you do not have the URL handy, you can do the following:

In a browser
, navigate to http://aws.amazon.com.

Hover your cursor over
Your Account
.

Click
Security Credentials
.

Note the values for
Access Key ID
and
Secret Access Key
. Keep these values in a safe place. They are the keys for charging AWS services to your account.

Step 5.
Download and Install the Oracle Secure Backup Cloud Module installer.

NOTE

If you are performing backups for an Oracle database running on

Amazon EC2 using one of Oracle’s Amazon Machine Images (AMIs),

you do not need to install the OSB Cloud Module. It has already been
installed for you under /home/oracle/scripts/.

The OSB Cloud Module installer can be downloaded from the Oracle Technology Network Cloud Computing Center:

In a browser
, navigate to http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/tech/cloud.

Review the license agreement, and click
All Supported Platforms
.

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Part II: Setup Principles and Practices

The download is a .zip file containing a .jar file and a readme. Place the .zip file on the database server that you will be backing up under the user that runs the Oracle software (usually oracle).

Verify that you have java 1.5 installed on the server. If you do not have java 1.5

installed, you will have to download and install it. Note that Oracle 11
g
includes java 1.5 under $ORACLE_HOME/jdk/bin/.

$ java –version

java version "1.5.0 16"

Install the OSB Cloud Module by running the installer and providing the appropriate arguments for your environment. You must pass these arguments to the installer:
Argument

Description

-awsid

Your Amazon Web Services Access Key ID

-awskey

Your Amazon Web Services Secret Access Key

-otnuser

Your Oracle.com Single Sign-on Account Login

-otnpass

Your Oracle.com Single Sign-on Password

-walletdir

Where to store the preceding login credentials

Linux Example