[LinuxUsers] Dual RAID Controllers

[Todd Lyons]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Dino K<socallinux at cloudcomp.info> wrote:
>
> The advantage of such an external SAN unit is that you can do Snapshotting
> for added redundancy even though with INNODB (if you are using it) you'll
> still have to manually dump the DB for snapshotting.

We use xtrabackup to copy live running mysql innodb backend servers.
This is a huge advantage because the databases do not have to be
locked for most of the time it is copying.  Nightly backup is a two
step process:

1. run innobackupex-1.5.1 telling it where to put the backup
  a. It copies the ibdata, all *.ibd files (if using
innodb_file_per_table), and the iblogfile, all without locking the
database.
  b. It copies the *.MY* and *.frm files, but it does lock the
database while it does this.
2. run innobackupex-1.5.1 --apply-log with the path to the backup
  a. This uses the innodb redo/undo functionality to fix the state of
the innodb files to something that can be dropped in place to a mysql
server (shut down, copy, start up) and it will start clean.

On our system, which is about 2000 databases (all
innodb_file_per_table) and consumes 73GB, it takes 7 hours to copy the
data to an nfs mounted backup location and 3 hours to "fix" it across
that nfs mount.

-- 
Regards...      Todd