Magazine Article | February 1, 2003

Backup Solution Revives Crashed Database

Business Solutions, February 2003
Written by: Carly Rohrer

The situation was not an unusual one for a global enterprise: a Web hosting and telecommunications provider was moving a server holding vital production data to a new office. Trouble was, in the middle of installing a routine patch to the database in preparation for a transfer of data from a facility in Illinois to an office in Ireland, the database system holding the information crashed.

Request for Backup
Ida McCarty is an Oracle database administrator and project manager with Imprint Systems (Naperville, IL). Imprint Systems was formed in 1998 to build on the systems and programming development accomplishments of Imprint Enterprises, a systems integrator based in Naperville, IL. McCarty approached this situation with Exabyte's VXA AutoPak 1X10. "It was imperative that I bring the system back up almost immediately," said McCarty. "They were migrating test and production information within 7 hours. In order to achieve this, the patch needed to be applied to the database and the information restored to the latest backup. I started using the VXA AutoPak autoloader. I was able to restore the database and reload the data, without the European team having any interruptions in their schedule."

The power, speed and reliability of Exabyte's VXA drives is not new to McCarty, who used an early version of their autoloader at a previous job to perform daily backups of terabytes of human resources, accounting, and sales data. Based on this previous experience, McCarty recommended her current client convert to Exabyte's VXA AutoPak to handle the regular backups of sales and human resources data totaling between 640 and 720 GB each day.

McCarty explained, "I have noticed that with the VXA AutoPak it takes me less time to check all of the backups for the various systems remotely. It runs like clockwork, and I can rest assured that the backups are complete and useable. Because I don't have to worry about the quality of the backup, it frees up my time to complete other administrative tasks, and to take on other projects."