 Okay, we're back, this is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my colleague, John Furrier. John, this is the spotlight on Oracle Backup and Recovery. Watch yourself. So here's the situation, we're here at Oracle Open World 2012 exclusive SiliconANGLE coverage and we are doing a special spotlight segment on Oracle Backup and Recovery. Larry Ellison in his keynote was very adamant in calling out this market segment as the hottest area right now. Oracle's going after it heavily and we're going to go drill down on this Oracle Open World spotlight sponsored by EMC, Backup and Recovery Solutions. EMC owns this marketplace. They are the market leader and Oracle is starting to dip their toes in the water here and try to come in hard and we're going to do a drill down on this. So Dave, I think it's important to note that it's every year backup gets bigger and bigger, backup and recovery because it's just, it gets multiple dimensions added on every year. You got virtualization, you got flash, you got spinning discs taking the roll of tape, you got disaster recovery. All these same things just don't go away. They keep on getting more complicated and more important. You're absolutely right, John. And backup is a complicated situation for the Oracle customers. We're going to drill into that but what we're going to do now is just set it up. We've got a set of slides that we're going to share with you, our audience. Some of the things that practitioners should be thinking about in Oracle and Backup Recovery. And Alex, if you've got the first slide, if you wouldn't mind putting that up there, we're going to start with the market angle. And basically what we see is this explosion of data. Everybody talks about the explosion of data. It continues in Oracle worlds. It pressures the DBA, it pressures the Oracle backup windows. The stat that we have here is that nearly 30% of Oracle shops are managing more than 100 terabytes. That comes from a survey of the Oracle, the independent Oracle users group. And there's additionally an increasing trend toward virtualizations. Now frequently that platform for virtualization is VMware. Of course there's Oracle Virtual Machine but virtualization, as we've talked about, pressures the backup window. Why? Because you have less resources to do the backup job. Backup is this big giant streaming batch application and it consumes a lot of resources. And if you consolidate servers and have less physical resources, well then you're stealing essentially from the amount of compute power that you have to perform a backup. That pressures backup windows. So virtualization is really a challenge to the backup admin. The other piece is in that same survey, the Oracle users group, backup and recovery and data protection was cited as one of the top three drivers of data growth. And the number one strategy to deal with that, John, was to add more disk. Just add more disk, okay? We have a problem. Well we talked to NASA yesterday and we talked last night at an event that basically they just add disk. I mean, this is destroying so much data and the problem is that it's not so much the data problem is what to get rid of. How fast can you get rid of the data? Because you need more disk space. So throwing disk drives and all of these government projects around big data, they just need to add capacity fast. Yeah, now the other stat from the Oracle user group survey is that 45% of the customers report that more than half of the backup data resides on tape. So that's obviously a problem. The tape is no longer the primary medium for backup. It really is being relegated into an archive role. So what we want to do now on the next slide is we're going to share with you some of the backup choices that you as Oracle users have. And there's really three broadly and there's four if you go into a granular segment. The first one is import, export. And exports and imports, they're essentially logical backups that take the logical definitions of data from the database and then bring it to a file. And it's really more of an archive than it is a backup. The second two that we'll talk about are really user managed. The first being the cold or offline backups and the hot or online backups. And the first case in the form of the cold and offline backups, you essentially have to shut the database down and backup all the data, the log files, everything. And the hot or online backups, you have to put the database into a specific mode. In Oracle speak, it's called archive log mode. I'm not going to go deeply into that, but you've got to take manual interventions or use scripts to do that. So it's kind of the legacy approach for Oracle users. And then of course there's R-Man, the recovery manager backups. And you really do that while the database is offline and you use this thing called R-Man utility to backup the database and we'll talk about how that's increasingly the preferred one. Now, if we take you through each of these and talk about some of the pluses and minuses, let's start with the import and the export. It's essentially a snapshot in time of the database. So the pluses are that it's really easy and it's independent of any database version. So if you're running on a new version versus an old version of Oracle, you can use the sort of import-export method. But the problem is you've got to quiesce the database and it's really a point in time recovery. And a lot of people would tell you that it's not really a backup, it's more of an archive. So now as we move on to the next sort of method, it's really the user-managed backups. As I said before, these were the two cold or offline or the hot or online backups. These are scripts that are written by the customer. You put the database into and out of backup mode. So the pluses are, I guess, that it's had a long history in Oracle shops and it's managed by the DBAs. So DBAs are control freaks, we all know that, for a good reason. And it's seen as cheap. But in the long run, the TCO is really going to add up. But the initial capex are relatively painless, but the bad thing is about user-managed backups is they're error-prone. And if your butt is on the line, you want to be very careful about how you approach user-managed backups. They're complicated, it's really all on the DBA. Your neck is going to be on the line. And the recovery is manual, you've got to go hunt and peck. And you really can't do incremental backups so it's not very efficient. So really the preferred approach is the next one that we're going to be talking about, which is RMAN backups. It's really driven by the Oracle backup API and it directly communicates with the database. It's much simpler than the user-managed backups. And it's got end-to-end visibility through that API on the backup. And of course, it allows you to do incremental. The benefit of incremental is you're only backing up to change data. And that is an obvious best practice these days. As well, restores are much simpler. You don't have to manually hunt and peck to get the data. You can automate that process. And it integrates with all major backup software. You know, the downside of RMAN, it's new to a lot of shops. It's perceived as, so the licenses are capacity-based. And oftentimes there's no extra charge. So RMAN backups are really the preferred approach. Now the last thing we're going to talk about are eight customer considerations that we've talked to the members of the Wikibon community about. These are the things that through peer insights and other activities have come to the fore as sort of best practice. First of all, a lot of customers that we talk to use different methods just to cover their butts. It's not necessarily a bad idea. The second point is you got to test recovery. You know, backup is one thing. Recovery is everything. So you got to test and retest the recovery. There's a golden rule in Oracle and backup and recovery. And that's really going to separate the backup data and the files from the recovery metadata. From the disks that contain the actual data files. So you don't want to lose the data and the metadata together. You're in big trouble if you do. So you really have to be careful about how you think about protecting those assets. So you want to separate the media and the RAID devices and the volumes and the file systems. Be smart about that. The fourth that we hear from our practitioners in the Wikibon community is think about virtualization. If you're going to virtualize and a lot more customers that we're talking to are choosing to virtualize their Oracle apps despite the fact that Oracle puts up friction and roadblocks. People are jamming the torpedoes. They're putting forth the virtualization predominantly VMware to a lesser extent, you know, OVM. And so you got to consider those impacts on backup. You're going to have less physical resources. So you really might want to think about re-architecting your backup process and there's a real imperative there to simplify it. Our man is really a best practice and really think about using disk-based backup with deduplication. It's stunning when we talk to practitioners in our Oracle community within Wikibon, the number who actually don't really know much about or haven't hopped on the deduplication bandwagon. There are some many, many benefits. People might say, well, you're not going to get necessarily the dedupe rates, but you really need to think about that and work with your vendor and figure out what kind of reduction you're going to get because there are some significant benefits. And the last piece is cloud, which was sort of non-existent in the Oracle community is slowly beginning to be talked about as a backup target. So keep your eye on that. So those are some of the trends, John, that we've seen. We're going to drill into these issues. We've got some practitioners and we've got some domain experts. I think the virtualization, Dave, is an interesting angle. I mean, I think obviously simplification is a user experience and obviously workflow process issue. You got to check the box there, but I'm interested in the virtualization angle on that because that's going to be a differentiation. And we talked about that a lot at VMworld. Oracle obviously has a whole different angle on virtualization, you know. A lot of customers don't want to use OVM. Frankly, most customers don't want to use OVM because it's to date anyway, but an inferior part. So what's your angle on this whole thing? I've been banging on this whole, I mean, I love Oracle's direction at some level. I mean, it's great if you want to go after a beachhead and own it all together, but no one's ever won in the enterprise with multi-multi-vendor as a requirement. So how does backup play into all of this? Is Oracle a lock-in on the backup there? I mean, when I started this announcement yesterday or Larry's announcement on Sunday, it looked like a lock-in to me. No, I think that Oracle's strategy is to provide as much functionality as it can to enable efficient and protective backups at the database level, but there's only so far it can go. You still need to get the data, de-dupe it, get it off-site, and there's a number of processes that you have to do beyond just the simple database backup, and that's really where the ecosystem competes with Oracle itself. Obviously it bought storage tech, so it's got some backup history, but there's a rich ecosystem of backup vendors out there that are competing for that business. All right, so keep it right there. We'll be back. We're going to double-click and triple-click on this topic. Oracle backup and recovery, protecting your data. Critical, critical issue for database administrators and Oracle admins, so keep it right there. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE live from Oracle OpenWorld at Moscone in San Francisco.