Healthcare Provider - Oracle SNAP Clone and RMAN Backup Optimization

The Customer is a regional healthcare provider in the state of Minnesota and were struggling with very slow backup times for their business applications running on an Oracle® database environment. As the business grew and databases increased in size, the Customer faced growing concerns over disaster recovery. Backups were taking 18 hours to complete, so any significant failure could jeopardize data integrity when the systems returned online. The backups were just too long and increased risk to the business.

mLogica was asked to provide an assessment report recommending best practices to reduce the processing time and improve efficiency of the Customer’s RMAN backup and SNAP Clone processes. The assessment required mLogica to perform a health check on the Oracle database environment, locate issues and present detailed feedback and recommendations to optimize performance.

mLogica deployed a team of Oracle experts and performed a comprehensive assessment of the Customer’s RMAN backup and SNAP Clone processes. The primary focus areas the team analyzed during the assessment included:

• Backup sets
• Archived logs
• Performance bottlenecks associated with V$views
• Performance bottlenecks associated with RMAN tape streaming
• Database parameters like LARGE_POOL_SIZE
• RMAN command debugging
• Backup options (tape/disk)

The formal Assessment Report identified the core issues impeding system performance; provided optimal configuration and suggested procedures for optimizing RMAN backup and SNAP Clone processes; plus recommended best practices for rectifying the glitches that slowed down the operational activities of RMAN backup and SNAP Clone components.

In addition, the team also conducted an overall health check of the Customer’s existing Oracle database platform and provided recommendations for general configuration and performance optimizations to enhance overall performance and stability.

The analysis and technical recommendations provided by mLogica enabled the Customer to resolve resource contention and data flow roadblocks that slowed down the processing time of RMAN backup and SNAP Clone components. Optimizing RMAN backup and SNAP Clone processes resulted in faster data backups, alleviated disaster recovery concerns and dramatically improved overall business system performance and stability. The backup time was decreased by more than 60%. The Customer was able to continue to grow their business without concerns for their internal legacy systems buckling under increased loads.