Sizing Exadata - Oracle Exadata Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach - page 130

Hybrid Columnar Compression is not supported on a non-Exadata standby environment; the reason we mention
this specifically is not just to discuss a potential performance impact in the event of a failover, but more so to mention
the potentially significant storage impact. Tables that are compressed with Hybrid Columnar Compression are
decompressed in flight to a non-Exadata standby, imposing both a performance impact and potentially significant
disk capacity impact.
From a planning and economics perspective, the decision to deploy a disaster recovery environment on Exadata
is, for many customers, a non-trivial budgetary line item. As such, like all disaster recovery planning, it is important to
build and communicate the business justification for a standby Exadata environment and be prepared to present cost
benefit analysis. One strategy that often helps customers justify a multisite Exadata deployment is to run
non-production databases at the disaster recovery site on the DR Exadata Database Machine.

5-8. Planning for Backups
Problem
You're running your Oracle databases on Exadata and are looking for options to back up your environments.

Solution
The backup and recovery topic for Oracle database environments, in general, is relatively broad. With Oracle Exadata
environment, the topic is no less complex; to provide continuity and protect your data, you need to back it up. With
Oracle Exadata environments, this means backing up your database files and software on both the compute, storage,
and network grids.
We're going to keep this recipe relatively short and not dive into installation or configuration details with
either Oracle backup solutions or other vendor products solutions. In short, these are the elements you need to be
concerned with:

• Back up your operating system binaries, Oracle software homes, and Oracle files on the

compute nodes just as you would on a non-Exadata environment. In other words, if you use
a vendor backup solution or software that requires backup agents to be installed on your
compute nodes, ensure that your vendor backup agents are supported by Exadata compute
node operating systems.

• You can also back up your compute server binaries by using LVM snapshots. Recipe 14-5

provides an example of this method.

• Your Exadata Storage Servers do not need to be backed up; Exadata automatically backs these

up using a self-maintained internal USB drive.

• Back up your InfiniBand switch configuration using Backup/Restore functionality in the

InfiniBand ILOM web interface.

• Backup your Oracle databases using Oracle RMAN, optionally storing copies in your Fast

Recovery Area inside your ASM “ RECO ” disk group.

• You can optimize your backups by backing up over your InfiniBand network:

• Install InfiniBand drivers on backup media servers, or

• Back up to Oracle ZFS storage appliance share over InfiniBand.

From a planning perspective, the most important of the above considerations is usually the topic of your
database backups, since the strategy you deploy could have impacts beyond data recovery and availability. For
example, if you choose to reserve enough capacity in your Fast Recovery Area for one day's worth of activity and an