Project Pxxx - Eurescom - European Institute for Research and

Volume 3: Annex 2 - Data manipulation and management issues Deliverable 1

The hot backup without transaction load was performed with 35 IBM Magstar 3590 drives and was wall-clock measured at 985 GB/hour and 6% total system overhead.

TOTALS

Database

Elapsed Time

Sustained Xfer

Hot Backup

1.0265 TB Oracle7 database

64 minutes

1.3 TB/hour

Wall clock Xfer

985 GB/hour

Total System Overhead

6% (94% of the system was still available for other processes)

•

Hot Backup with Transaction Load at 901 GB/hour with 35 drives

The hot backup with transaction load was performed with 35 IBM Magstar 3590 drives and was wall-clock measured at 901 GB/hour and 21% total system overhead.

Scripts were used to generate a load of 75 transactions per second (4500 tpm).

TOTALS

Database

Elapsed Time

Sustained Xfer

Wall clock Xfer

Total System Overhead

Hot Backup with Transaction Load

1.0265 TB Oracle7 database

70 minutes

1.1 TB/hour

901 GB/hour

21% @ 4500 updates per minute load (79% of the system was still available for other processes)

B.3

Interpreting the Results

Demonstrating the ability to back up a true terabyte database in approximately one hour is an important landmark for company’s with VLDBs looking for a capable backup solution.

Why is one hour so important? Taking a VLDB off-line directly cuts into a 24x7 company’s bottom line. In a recent Information Week article, one of the largest banks in the country estimated the bank would lose close to $50 million for every 24 hours, or $2.08 million per hour, their system is down.1

Backup of terabyte databases requires certain features and functionality to take advantage of their sheer size:

•

Hot (Online) backup capability: As applications increasingly demand 24x7 uptime, "hot" online database backup will take precedence over "cold" offline database backup.

•

Availability: Database availability is key. The backup system should have minimal impact on availability, so that as the database grows the backup system will not interfere with its’ availability to the end-users.

•

Ability to Scale: the system must be designed so that it will not collapse under the weight of its own growth in 18 to 24 months. 10% growth of terabyte database will use considerably more resources than 10% growth of a 10 gigabyte database.

•

Support for Heterogeneous Environments: today’s terabyte UNIX sites consist of a wide variety of platforms, operating systems and tape libraries. The backup software should not limit your choices.

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1999 EURESCOM Participants in Project P817-PF