Guest Column: Delivering On The Corporate Ideal Of Integrated Application And Database Protection

By Jerome M Wendt, Lead Analyst and President, DCIG Inc.

The role of backup and recovery for corporate databases is evolving. Backup and recovery windows for databases are shrinking, or gone, while corporate expectations for database availability and recovery continue to rise. These expectations are exacerbated by the growing number of databases that companies manage, the expanding amount of data contained in each database and the limited number of database administrators (DBAs) that companies can dedicate to this task.

DBAs are often responsible for multiple types of databases and enterprise applications and can find the complexity associated with setting up and managing the data protection for each of them overwhelming. Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, and MySQL are, among other applications and databases, now part of many corporate computing environments as a result of corporate acquisitions, consolidations, growth and mergers. Managing multiple applications and databases stretch DBAs since their skill sets and knowledge are not always easily transferable from one application or database to another.

For instance, as part of protecting Oracle databases, DBAs may need to understand details regarding Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) before they can implement backup policies that can account for multiple recovery scenarios. To protect Exchange, SQL Server or MySQL databases, DBAs may need to create and manage complex scripts to take advantage of native backup and snapshot utilities found in Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems. Configuring and implementing backup policies for each of these takes time which DBAs often do not possess. In these circumstances, DBAs need an automated backup policy that they can centrally administer and easily apply to computing environments with mixed applications and databases.

Backup and recovery service level agreements (SLAs) for each database also impact the organization in different ways. The failure to timely recover a mission critical database when it experiences an outage or extended period of downtime could be devastating to a company's reputation. Other databases used for internal testing and development purposes may not be critical to daily operations but are crucial to the corporation's long term survival and competitive positioning in the marketplace. Failure to adequately protect this data is equally detrimental to the company.