Can I Use NetApp StorageGRID Object Storage for Oracle Database Backups?

Your databases hold your company’s most critical assets, including customer information, corporate financials, human resources information, and other critical data sources. In today’s constantly connected global business environment, you need a cost-effective and reliable strategy for protecting your data from disasters. Good data protection practices require keeping usable business-critical backups offsite. This has traditionally been implemented by writing backups to tape and storing the tapes offsite.

The overall pricing and operational characteristics of cloud object storage like Amazon s3 and Azure Blob make it a compelling alternative to shipping tapes offsite. Good cloud infrastructure offers storage redundancy, security, availability, and scalability with a geographic distribution that allows it to absorb a broad range of adverse events with minimal to no loss of availability. However, the only objection to over-the-network cloud backup is that limited network bandwidth can slow the transfer of large volumes of data, such as a full backup of a large production Oracle database.

Our Solution

Configure Cloud Module and Write Backups to StorageGRID in Five Steps

1. Download the package from Oracle site and unzip. The download contains a jar file that should be executed by an Oracle user.
2. Create the directory osbws_wallet in $ORACLE_HOME/dbs. This location is used for storing the wallet keys needed to access the StorageGRID tenant account’s bucket.
3. Finally, execute the jar file with the following mandatory parameters:The AWSID and AWSKey parameters refer to the access ID and access key needed to access a specific tenant in StorageGRID. The location parameter must always be us-east-1 because this is the default location passed for the StorageGRID no matter what Geo is being used. This parameter might differ for other cloud object stores. The awsEndpoint parameter represents the load balancer endpoint URL (could be HTTP or HTTPS) needed to access the bucket. You can also host multiple URLs to access the objects in the bucket with an appropriate record in the DNS and a self-signed or commercial certificate. While creating a load balancer endpoint, StorageGRID allows you to either generate your own self-signed certificate or upload a commercial certificate. If you are using a self-signed certificate, then you must verify that it is trusted by the Oracle host; otherwise, the jar file execution fails. The following example demonstrates how to use keytool to import your self-signed certificates so that they are trusted. Use the -file parameter to pass the self-signed certificate that was generated by StorageGRID.xxx
4. After jar execution is successful, you can see that four files were automatically created by Oracle: three files in the $ORACLE_HOME/dbs location, two of which are related to keys in the osbws_wallet directory, and one initialization file osbws.ora recording the host details and wallet location.The fourth file is a library used by RMAN that is generated in the $ORACLE_HOME/lib directory with the name libosbws.so.
5. Finally, execute the RMAN command to test sending the Oracle backups directly to StorageGRID.The bucket is automatically created by RMAN. You can use the S3 browser or any third-party tools to check the objects in the StorageGRID tenant bucket.You can also list the backup for more details in RMAN because it has cataloged the metadata of the backup pieces or backupset. You can look for the Media parameter in the list backup to know whether the backup is in S3 or any other S3-compatible storage.

Best Practices

1. Use multiple RMAN channels for higher parallelism resulting in full utilization of the network.
2. Compression helps overcome the network bandwidth limitations and can improve performance.
3. Use multi-section backups. Oracle Database allows multiple channels to back up a single file in parallel with the help of section size parameter: BACKUP DEVICE TYPE SBT DATABASE SECTION SIZE 1g;
4. Use the RMAN Block Change Tracking feature to optimize the performance of your daily incremental backups.
5. Backup of an on-premises database to StorageGRID can be much faster and more efficient than directly backing up to cloud object storage. Optionally, you can use a cloud mirror if you want to replicate cold objects to a cloud object store, based on your ILM policies.
6. If you are using an active Oracle Data Guard instance for your production database, then you should leverage that instance to run incremental RMAN backups more quickly.

Benefits of Using NetApp StorageGRID for Database Backups

Multiregion cluster, single namespace.

Deterministic placement of data.

Erasure coding.