Outages caused by system failure in an e-business environment can have dire consequences for dot.companies, yet outages are also part of routine maintenance procedures in any data-heavy business. Sybase has released a set of tools to give e-businesses the ability to perform routine maintenance and backup in real-time, rather than having to power off some or all of a live system.
Sybase SA has released a set of solutions that allow routine maintenance operations to co-exist with active users, and implements a back-up routine that still allows all data to be available to users.
By placing most of the backup logic in a separate program, Sybase's Backup Server maintains the performance of the database during online backup. Backup Server attaches to the disk devices directly and does all the I/O itself.
Sybase's Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) allows routine maintenance operations to co-exist with active users. Its online consistency check utility transparently searches for and corrects corrupted data. It also provides for online data reorganisation. Being able to perform these maintenance and tuning operations online provides for continuous availability of the database.
"It is preferable to correct data corruption prior to an outage than to recover a database afterward," says Julie Tomlinson, marketing manager at Sybase SA. "Sybase's online consistency check utility transparently searches for and corrects corrupted data.
"The ability to perform these maintenance and tuning operations online provides for continuous availability of the database," she says. The strength of the tools lies in their proactive management of data and procedures, ensuring that data is clean, backed up and readily available.
Tomlinson points out that the approach reduces the likelihood of having to perform datbase restoration as a result of an outage. "Database restoration is the last resort in recovering from an outage. A database management system that can backup at a rate of 500 Mb/hour, but can only be restored at the rate of 40Mb/hour, does little more than provide a false sense of security. A one terabyte database can be backed up in two hours. However, restoration would take 25 hours."
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