 I'm John Furrier with siliconangle.com and siliconangle.tv and I'm here with my co-host Dave Vellante. We are live inside Oracle Open World in San Francisco, California, where the streets are closed, people are partying, tons of schmoozing, 45,000 people shutting down all the streets. Larry Ellison gave a keynote last night. Oracle is the big bad gorilla on the block here in the tech industry and everyone's here. So we're excited to cover it and the top news here is that Oracle is going heavily into the hardware business and increasing their performance. They own Java. They're having Java one going on in San Francisco as well. So every single tech geek, every enterprise guy is in town, Dave, and we're covering it wall-to-wall in a blanket. Siliconangle.com is where all the news is breaking. We'll be covering the news. We'll be covering specific topics that we see as trending items within our dashboard that we're monitoring. And we're going to have great guests at one o'clock. We've got Ray Wang with news coming in. We've got tons of executives coming in and we're going to talk tech, virtualization, cloud, mobile. Oracle owns the enterprise. They're in the top accounts. They're probably the one company, Dave, that's being attacked by everybody. Everyone wants their market share. Highly competitive. Larry Ellison is an industry legend who's known for sailing yachts. He's bringing the America's Cup to San Francisco. And last night, got a World Series ring from the San Francisco Giants on stage. So what an event here in San Francisco. We're going to bring it all there. We've got all the news covered here, John. As you said, keep it right here on siliconangle.tv, siliconangle.com, wikibond.org. If you've got some questions, check out those resources. If we don't have the answer, send us a note, ask a question, send us a tweet, and we'll try to get it for you in the community. 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So John, in these spotlights, we like to go deep and share with practitioners our knowledge and our community's knowledge and bring in subject matter experts and we're going to talk about data protection. It's a very important topic. You know, data protection is like insurance, right? I mean, nobody wants to spend a lot for it but you have to do it. And in the Oracle world, it's probably more important because it's your critical data. So what we have here is we prepared some graphics that Mark's going to show you and we're just going to talk through some of this stuff. So maybe John, we can start by taking a look at the market angle. And as we talked about at VMworld, there's an explosion of data. Joe Tucci was on stage this morning talking about just an enormous amount of data. IDC says 1.2 zettabytes shipped last year. That's a trillion billion or a billion trillion, however you want to look at it. And they say that's going to grow 44x by the end of the decade. And the other trend we see is virtualization, right? You saw that virtualization obviously was a big theme at VMworld. Well, it's happening in Oracle shops as well. Even though Oracle, you know, not necessarily supportive of virtualization products like VMware or Hyper-V pushing its own, but the dominant platform within Oracle shops is VMware. And I would say that 90% of the shops out there that I talked to are doing some kind of or will be doing some kind of VMware. So that pressures the backup space. Now Oracle DBAs basically have three choices that are Oracle supported, right? And that means that Oracle is going to, support them fully and embrace them. And there are really three things, user managed, which is really old school, Oracle Recovery Manager, otherwise known as RMAN and backup parlance and Oracle Import Export. I want to talk about each of those and talk about the trade-offs and the pluses and minuses and just give a brief overview before we dig into it with the subject matter experts. But the one big theme here, John, is, as you know, disk is replacing tape as the primary backup. And the real reason is speed of recovery and reliability, right? Disk is way, way faster, all right? And of course, deduplication makes the economics of disk much, much better. So the first one I'm going to talk about, John, is user managed backup. And this is the old tried and true. They're basically what they are is scripts that are written by the DBA or somebody else within the organization. And you, the scripts put the database into and out of backup mode and do handle all the tasks associated with backup. So it's a very manual, very script-oriented. It's a long history in Oracle shops, which is why a lot of people like it. It's managed by the DBA so they can control it. And it's seen as cheap. A lot of shops are concerned that you got to go out and buy a license for an agent if you're doing our man. Now, a lot of that has changed and I'll talk about that. The problem with user managed backups is they're very error-prone. Because they're scripts and because there's a lot of manual intervention, you've got to really pay attention to what you're doing. It's complicated for the DBA. And the recovery in particular, you know backup is one thing, recovery is everything. And the recovery here is manual. And as a result of all this, you can't do incremental backup. So you're backing up the whole database. It's the entire database every single time. So it's a bandwidth suck. And if you're virtualizing, that makes it that much worse. So the second option we're going to talk about is our man. And our man is by far the preferred approach. Oracle is fully supporting it. And when you talk to practitioners about best practice, it's really our man is what it's all about. Our man is an Oracle API. We talked a lot at VMworld a couple of weeks ago about VMware APIs. Well, this is Oracle's backup API. So it directly communicates with the database. It's like a fast pipeline between the data and the database, the backup device, the backup system and the backup process. So it's much, much simpler than so-called user manage because you got end-to-end visibility on that backup. What that does is it allows you to do incremental backup so you can just back up the changes. So you're backing up a lot less data. Obviously you got to do a full backup the first time through, but you're talking about much, much smaller data sets every night. So that means your backup windows are a lot less pressured. And so restorations are much, much simpler. You can just pick and choose what you want. And it integrates with all the major backup software whether it's Symantec, EMC, Commvault, all the major packages integrate with our man. Some of the drawbacks is it's new to a lot of shops. People, new changes, scary to people. And it's perceived as expensive because there used to be some license costs involved with licensing the agent, although most of those issues are resolved because people are now licensing or charging on a capacity basis. So there's really no extra charge. And the last one I'm going to talk about before we talk about some user imperatives is import-export backup. I should put that in quotes. What really this is is a snapshot in time. It's really not a backup. It's simple, easy peasy. It's a snapshot in time. And the other nice thing about it is it's database version independent. So an import-export backup on one version of a database will work on a new or older version of a database. It really doesn't matter. The problem is you got to qui-est the database. You can only recover at a point in time. It's not really a backup. It's an archive. So it's easy, but it's not what's recommended. So John, we've put together some eight customer imperatives and I'll run through them quickly and then we'll dig into the spotlight here. And the first one is backup often. Vote often, we'll backup often. And then test that backup that could be recovered. A lot of customers don't adequately test recovery. And there's a golden rule in Oracle Backup and really in any backup and recovery, it's really separate the backup data and all the metadata and all the files that you need to recover from the disks that contain the actual data files. So if you have a problem, you really want to separate the media, the RAID devices, the volumes, and the file systems. Even though they're reliable, they break sometimes. And if you lose the data and the backup data, you're basically in huge trouble. Hey, that's all great and all, but I mean, that's like kind of common sense. Why isn't it imperative that it should be doing it anyway? What's different now? Well, because Oracle, a lot of customers don't do that, believe it or not. And if you don't do that in Oracle, you're talking about mission critical data, right? So that's why it's so important. What's the problem? What's the key problem in your opinion? The key problem is that if you put the backup data and the corporate data on the same device and somehow it gets corrupted or somehow you lose that media, you're out, you're down, you're fired. That's really the problem. The data's lost. The data's lost. It's gone. It's corrupted forever. So Oracle's in all these top zillion accounts, 20 top banks, and they don't do backup? Well, they do them, but it's complicated. And there are some new people to, Oracle, it's a spectrum, it's like anything. You've got people that are very experienced at doing backups and people that aren't. And the ones that aren't might make mistakes because this stuff is complicated. The other thing is virtualization, right? Virtualization, we talked about this a lot, stresses backup. So you've got to simplify the process. That's why, really, our man is the preferred approach. You got to look at that as the best practice. And do the math on disk-based recovery. Ideally, you could leave at least 24 hours of your redo logs on disk because you don't want to have to get that stuff from tape. If you got to do a recovery of a redo log, you want to do it from disk, you don't want to do it from tape. What are the key virtualization trends that are driving backup? Obviously, virtualization, great technology. Disk is replacing tape, SSDs and flashes placing the disk. What's the main tech going on that drive this? As it relates to backup, the biggest issue with virtualization is, as we know, servers traditionally have been underutilized, right? That 10%, 15%. Well, backup is one application that is not underutilized. When you're doing a backup, you're a 90% utilization of that service. So when you virtualize, you consolidate, you have now less physical assets. As a result, you're more constrained and your backup window gets more pressured. So you have to be smart about the way you architect it. So, great question. So that's really, John, the quick snapshot. And we're now going to dig deep into some of these issues. We're going to talk about specifically what is the direction of backup, what practitioners are doing.