Zmanda backs up Oracle apps

Started in 1991 as the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver at the University of Maryland, open source backup software project Amanda is a favorite among system administrators today. Zmanda Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., which offers both open source and commercial versions of the tool, will announce this week an agent for Oracle 10g and 11g systems.

Chander Kant, CEO, argues the value of open source is magnified when it comes to backup software. He points to a traditional corporate seven-year document retention policy. If your proprietary backup software supplier goes out of business or if you need to change vendors because of a merger, Kant claims you will still need to keep at least some remnant of the old technology around for seven years (with a valid and active license, to boot) in order to recover the data as it was archived for, say, governance purposes.

By having your backup software's source code that conforms to industry standards freely available with active development and user community, Kant contends, you're less likely to face operational restrictions in your backup tools in the years ahead.

With that in mind, Kant says in the new product Zmanda has included support for Oracle's popular Recovery Manager (RMAN) module. Zmanda will backup Oracle applications running on Linux, Solaris and Windows systems. For the latter, it integrates with Microsoft's Visual Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to ease the archiving Windows data.

Available today, Zmanda Oracle Agent works with Amanda release 2.6.4. Pricing starts at $300 per server.