Unify Your Backup and Recovery Strategy with LiteSpeed® for SQL ...

Unify Your Backup and Recovery Strategy with LiteSpeed®
for SQL Server and LiteSpeed® Engine for Oracle
USING LITESPEED: REAL-WORLD EXAMPLES
To wrap up, I offer several scenarios I have addressed with LiteSpeed.
Need Both Compression and Encryption but
Backup Window is Short
This is the most frequent scenario. Most of our “in-scope of compliance”
applications have large databases and are very busy, with a limited window of
availability for backups and other maintenance. Therefore, we need the backup
completed as quickly as possible, while at the same time ensuring it is encrypted
and compressed to reduce storage needs.
LiteSpeed is the best choice for us in this scenario. LiteSpeed encrypts both our
Oracle and SQL Server databases to the same encryption level, without the need
for extra-cost Oracle options, and compresses them to about 10-30% of their
original size—just as fast as the uncompressed, unencrypted native backup utility
(and often faster).
Need Compression and Have Plenty of Time
We do have some large databases that see relatively light use. This is typical when
an application stores a lot of data but accesses it infrequently, such as lookups on
an historical billing database.
In these cases, our primary goal is to reduce the storage needs of the backup as
much as possible. Therefore, we want to maximize the compression, even if that
means increased elapsed time and processor utilization. LiteSpeed addresses
this situation nicely by allowing us to configure a higher compression level on
both platforms.
Need Speed More than Anything Else
In some cases, the elapsed time of the backups is causing us the most pain. The
speed of a backup depends on the size of the backup, disk I/O speed, processor
speed, system utilization by other processes, and the compression and encryption
levels. In most cases, we can achieve the fast backups we need with LiteSpeed by
using the minimum compression level and no encryption. In fact, sometimes the
backups are dramatically faster.
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