Snap Management Utility for Oracle Database

Oracle Corp. announced Snap Management Utility, an enhancement to its storage software portfolio designed to streamline and automate critical tasks for customers using Oracle Database with Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance .

Integrated with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, Snap Management Utility automates and accelerates the creation and management of snapshot-based copies and clones of Oracle databases by reducing the steps required from nine to one for snapshots and twelve to one for clones.

Snap Management Utility allows customers to create virtually unlimited snapshots for infinite scalability versus the maximum 255 allowed by competitive offerings such as NetApp Snapshot software.

It is available as a software option for the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance and enables database administrators to perform snapshot and cloning operations directly in its browser user interface.

Snap Management Utility is qualified and supported on Oracle Database 10g and Database 11g and on Oracle Engineered Systems, including Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle SPARC SuperCluster and Oracle Database Appliance .

It helps minimize risk by allowing increased frequency and consistency of backups, and provides a higher level of protection for critical data and improved recovery times in the event of an outage. It also complements the built-in availability and data protection features of Sun ZFS Storage Appliances and Oracle Database.

In addition to streamlining data protection processes,
customers using Snap Management Utility
for Oracle Database with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance can:

• Create user-initiated clones for test, development, quality assurance, reporting and training in only one additional step. This helps accelerate product development cycles by putting new environments in the hands of developers in minutes, rather than in hours or weeks previously required to coordinate database and storage resources independently.
• Automate snapshot management for scheduling, policy-based retention and annotating snapshots with metadata. This simplifies database administrators’ daily tasks, rapidly perpetuates best practices and allows them to easily manage their own unique environments.
• Restore to a snapshot at any point in time, easily returning to a prior state in case of errors, which helps speed the software development process.
• Save money and storage space by leveraging point-in-time storage-efficient virtual copies of the data instead of storing physical copies of each dataset.

Sun ZFS Storage Appliances demonstrate performance in major storage benchmarks and are the only NAS products engineered with Oracle’s complete software stack, from Oracle Applications to Oracle Database and Oracle VM, as well as Engineered Systems such as the Oracle Database Machine and SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 .

"Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliances are highly integrated with Oracle Database to optimize configuration, simplify management and deliver best-in-class performance," said Phil Bullinger, SVP, Storage, Oracle. "Oracle Snap Management Utility simplifies the creation and management of Oracle Database snapshots and clones and puts control back into the hands of the database administrator. Ultimately, this helps businesses reduce risk by streamlining data protection processes and improve the bottom line through increased business agility in test, development, quality assurance and training."