HP Application Recovery Manager software A.06.10 Concepts guide (March 2008)

1 Overview
Introduction
Zero downtime backup (ZDB) and instant recovery (IR) have two great advantages
over other backup and restore techniques:
• Minimal downtime or impact on the application system during backup
• Short restore times (minutes instead of hours)
The growing requirement for data security for mission critical applications, together
with the increasing sophistication of Storage Area Network (SAN) environments, has
resulted in a rapid expansion in the use of large disk arrays containing RAID
technology. These can hold large application databases, containing vast amounts
of data.
By using storage virtualization techniques, arrays can be divided into many virtual
disks. These can easily be copied within an array, perhaps many times dependent
on array technology and available storage space. This makes it possible to perform
operations on copies of data without any risk to the original data. In particular, it
enables effective backup solutions for applications in high-availability and
mission-critical areas.
Conventional tape backup and restore techniques are not fast enough to handle the
enormous amounts of data involved in a world of terabyte databases where
information is expected to be available 24 hours a day.
This manual describes ZDB and instant recovery techniques that use the potential of
disk arrays to streamline backup and recovery.
Zero downtime backup
Conventional methods of backing up to tape are not well suited for large database
applications; either the database has to be taken offline or, if the application allows
it, put into “hot-backup mode” while data in it is streamed to tape.
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