IBM to ease online backups

IBM this week will announce new software technology that it claims will allow administrators to back up a DB2 database without bringing it down.

The capability is essential for corporations that run around-the-clock operations, said Eric Godfrey, manager of database administration at Tyson Foods.

Tyson spends more than five hours every Sunday backing up just one of its two production databases to off-line storage media. The company hopes to drastically reduce this maintenance window by using IBM's technology, Godfrey said.

"There's increasing pressure from business units in terms of having our [systems] available all the time," he added.

At the core of IBM's new functionality is a DB2 enhancement that exploits the FlashCopy and Peer-to-Peer Remote Copy capabilities of IBM's new Enterprise Storage Server technology.

These features let administrators create mirror images of active production volumes on separate storage systems.

The latest tweak to DB2 enhances this capability by allowing users to continue conducting transactions against the primary database while the mirrored image is being backed up, according to Sanjoy Das, an IBM storage manager. Once the backup is complete, the mirror volume is resynchronized with the production volume.

"IBM is adding hot-split capabilities to DB2, which is similar to what Ora-cle has been offering for several years," according to Steve Duplessie, an analyst at The Enterprise Storage Group.

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