Friday, May 6, 2011

XtraBackup Manager - Email Alerts and More Nexenta/ZFS Testing

Just a quick note - I have added support for email alerts on failed backups into XtraBackup Manager.

Now if something goes awry, XtraBackup Manager can optionally send some detailed information to the email address(es) of your choice!

This should allow you to easily hook to SMS gateways, NOC alert lists, etc.

Additionally, we have been doing some preliminary testing of XtraBackup Manager on a Nexenta machine with 8 Xeon CPUs using ZFS with lzjb compression.

We are getting around 3.8x compression and the Gigabit NICs seem to be the bottleneck in the speed here. Both CPU and disk utilisation look very low.

Our plan is to use a 10 Gigabit NIC in the Nexenta Backup host and stack it with storage - it should make for a very cost effective and space efficient backup host.

Meanwhile, development work continues towards a 1.0 !

Happy Friday!

Cheers,
Lachlan

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

XtraBackup Manager - Support for Nexenta (OpenSolaris)!

Hi Folks,

This is just a quick update to let you know that, after much cursing and frustration with my lack of Solaris experience, I have managed to make XtraBackup Manager work on Nexenta (NCP3).

So why would you care?

The answer is because Nexenta is OpenSolaris based and therefore has support for ZFS. I think ZFS is an awesome filesystem to combine with XtraBackup Manager, because you can benefit from transparent compression at the filesystem level.

This means you can store a whole lot more on less disk and you don't have to deal with compressing and uncompressing your backups all the time.

Sure, you could always use Nexenta Community or Enterprise appliances as a NFS mounted filer, but why would you want to stream all of your backup data into one Linux based server to run XtraBackup Manager just so that it all goes out an interface via NFS to the real storage?

This way you can run XtraBackup Manager right on the file server and save yourself network bandwidth and rackspace at the same time. Huzzah!

So far the feature set and documentation remain basic, but I will be continuing development as we want to get this tested so that we can use it ourselves in Production ASAP.

Once again, if you are interested in checking out the project you can find more at:

http://code.google.com/p/xtrabackup-manager

Feedback and comments are welcomed!

Lachlan