Last night I watched almost the entire 5 hour live webcast announcing Oracle's strategies regarding the Sun Microsystems acquisition. As a near-evangelist for Sun and Solaris, I'm very happy with the deal finally going through and even happier that most of what Oracle said makes sense to me as a customer.
Whether you are dealing with disk I/O in reading the data from the disks, or CPU for compressing or encrypting the data (or both- remember to compress and then encrypt!), or network for transferring the data to a backup server, the added load of a backup on your production servers is unwelcome. For this reason, the period of time during which backups can be made, aka. backup window, may be limited- even severely.
You may say, "It only takes me X hours to do a full backup of everything", but over time backup windows are notorious for becoming too small. Backups are split over multiple days, technologies upgraded, etc. When planning a backup strategy, my approach is to eliminate the backup window altogether- that is do whatever you can to take the backup off the production hardware altogether.
Storage Snapshots are one method for taking the production servers out of the backup equation. By creating a consistent, point in time snapshot on your storage, and mounting it on your backup server, you can backup your data using your backup server's resources while your production servers continue as usual.
Caveats of this method in general are:
Reporting projects are the kind of projects which never seem to end. After a couple iterations I've come to the following conclusions:
Unfortunately, if you need to get data from heterogeneous databases, ie. Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, etc. into a single reporting database, replication is not a simple solution. If you are running expensive database software in production, it may not be cost effective to run the same database for reporting.
Of course there are cross database replication solutions like Golden Gate or SharePlex but they are very expensive. I had already given up on getting data from Oracle into MySQL for reports when I stumbled across Tungsten Replicator.
I've been working with Unix for a fairly long time now- about 13 years.
I'll admit that I started with Linux and thought it was light years ahead of SunOS 4.x running on those old SPARC machines- I mean who had heard of SPARC processors? I remember my boss trying to explain to me that even an older SPARC processor was more powerful than a newer Intel Pentium processor. I didn't really believe him. In time, I convinced them to get rid of most of their SPARC/Solaris in favor of the hip, free, and cheap Intel/Linux combination.
Now I see that I couldn't have been more wrong. I realize that SunOS 4.x probably still has features which I don't know how to use properly. When I look at Solaris 10, ZFS, Zones, LDOMS, DTrace, etc. I not really sure you could pay me to work with Linux (that would be soo depressing). That isn't even mentioning the SPARC hardware it runs on- Can any Intel server compare to a T5140???
What is a Systems Architect?
Systems Architects have years of experience in the various parts of the systems they work with. Most probably, they specialize in a specific area area of expertise where they began their careers, but have since expanded their knowledge by learning from their colleagues and from life's lessons. To get to their position, they have proven their ability to analyze and understand the needs and constraints of the business they work in. They are responsible for deciding what technologies will provide the best solutions for a business, how to integrate them with existing systems, and how to retire them when they are obsolete.
There are several flavors of Systems Architects.