November 21, 2012 at 5:40 am
I'm interested in hearing from others where the company has tried to have systems / infrastructure / storage people handle all backups, restores and disaster recovery. We're about to adopt Netapp Sql SnapManager (SMSQL ) and it appears that our managers ( DBA management ) do not want us involved.
Is this common when the database sizes reach a certain point? I can see the advantages of technology that "backs up" the changes / deltas using something like Netapp's snap technology. And when you only have a 250MB network pipe from server facility to DR server facility ( our office) things like log shipping may become impossible -- especially during maintenance when log backups can reach 25GB each or more.
Things like mirroring were discussed, but again, would require DBA involvement. As a practical matter, what I'm seeing is network admins drafted to become storage engineers who don't know anything about databases, and don't really want to know. You at least have to understand recovery models and such.
Our situation must be an oddity and surely most shops going this route get their storage staff adequate training up front. The other large question mark is how this storage technology will actually provide live sql databases on the DR servers. We're already snapping the data files from site to site, but not sure how that results in a database unless you can just attach them --- oops, DBA involvement.
Perhaps a Sql Snap Manager "restore" actually creates the DR databases. It would be interesting to know if their are tools out there primarily intended for DBAs ( litespeed? ) that can handle large databases ( greater than a few TB ), and do backups/restores in just a few minutes.
We got far enough in our testing to see that once a "baseline" is established, a 2TB database can be "backed up" in under 2 minutes. And a plus is the fact that these backups and the associated IO freeze on the data files shows up in the sql error log so we have some visibility.
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