Oracle Corporation
10/16/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 10/15/2024 21:56
Announcing OCI Block Volume Direct APIs for changed block tracking between backups
We're pleased to announce the availability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Block Volume service direct APIs that enable changed block tracking between two backups. This feature is most beneficial for data protection services vendors and developers of backup and restore solutions.
Managing backups with ISVs
Customers using backup products in their on-premises or multicloud environments want a way to centralize their backup, archiving, and reporting for data on OCI. For this goal, they rely on data protection vendors and independent software vendors (ISVs) or have implemented their own custom solutions. Data protection vendors and their solutions can now identify and retrieve the blocks that changed between two backups directly in order to analyze and optimize their backup workflows. They don't need to restore two full volumes from two backups to compare and process them.
We've partnered with ISVs, such as Commvault, to enable this capability for Block Storage volumes. "Commvault and OCI enable enterprise customers to fortify their ransomware and data protection strategies," said Michael Fasulo, senior director of product management at Commvault. "OCI is a key partner and a preferred cloud for Oracle applications. As OCI enhances the data protection experience for OCI Block Storage with direct APIs for change block tracking, Commvault is pleased to be partnering closely to test and integrate our experience. Our mutual customers will continue to benefit from our continued partnership and joint innovations."
Sam Grover of Commvault describes how they utilize this capability for faster backup processing and enhanced data protection in his blog post, Revolutionize Your Backup Strategy.
If you're using a vendor to manage your backups, contact the vendor you're working with or your account manager to utilize this capability. If you manage your own backups, you can also use it.
Our service continues to evolve and innovate to address customer and partner challenges. With this feature update, we now provide direct APIs to optionally provide two backup IDs instead of one for restoring from backups. Third-party backup products can use this interface to get changed blocks between two backups taken from the same volume.
The process is same as creating a recovery volume by restoring from a backup. In this case, the newly created recovery volume contains only the differences between the two backups. You can manage it like a regular volume, with several normal operations supported, such as create, delete, and commands to identify and retrieve the changed blocks. However, the restored recovery volume isn't intended to be used in the same way as a regular volume. For example, it doesn't have a usable file system, and you can't create and mount a file system to it.
Retrieving the changed blocks between two backups has the following steps:
Create a volume that contains the changed blocks by providing the first and second backup OCIDs as the source.
Attach and connect the volume to a Linux-based instance.
Scan the attached volume for changed blocks using the command, SCSI GET LBA STATUS, and retrieve the reported changed blocks
Delete the volume after you finish processing the volume. The volume that contains only the changed blocks between two backups is a full provisioned size volume, which is same size as the source volume used to create the two backups. So, to minimize cost, we recommend deleting it as soon as the backup solution has extracted the data out of it.
Pricing
The new API call and this capability incurs no extra charge, and the price of volumes and backups doesn't change. You're charged for the full provisioned volume that contains the delta between two backups. The recovery volume is a regular data volume, so it's priced at the current Oracle Cloud storage pricing. We recommend that the recovery volume is kept for a short time. It's metered and billed per second granularity and should be deleted right after the changed data is extracted from it. To minimize the cost for you, we use the Balanced performance setting on the recovered volume (10 VPU/GB). You can customize the performance as needed if you demand more performance for it, except the Lower Cost option.
For details on how to use this feature, check the OCI Block Volume documentation for direct APIs.
Try it for yourself
We want you to experience these new features and all the enterprise-grade capabilities that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers. It's easy to try them out with Oracle Cloud Free Tier. For more information, see the following resources:
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure storage portfolio
Block Volume service overview
Policy-based automated volume group backups
Direct APIs
Replicating a volume
Volume group replication
Volume and backup encryption
OCI Vault service