Delphix Products

Delphix Server Overview

Harness the Power of Software

Databases are at the heart of the information economy and require careful handling and management. Applications interact with databases in myriad ways and often require upgrades, tuning, or new development. These frequent, repeated demands put pressure on production databases and result in complex, redundant, and expensive infrastructure. Oracle estimates the average customer creates seven copies of each production database for development, testing, QA, staging, operational reporting, pilots, and training. Worse, application development and program timelines are often compromised by process or infrastructure delays.

Delphix software creates a virtual environment, where virtual databases (VDBs) can be instantly provisioned without additional storage requirements. Rather than create redundant copies of infrastructure, Delphix serves multiple VDBs from a shared storage footprint—coordinating changes and differences in the background. Unlike storage snapshot solutions, Delphix incorporates a patent-pending technology called TimeFlow to create full, read/write VDBs that can be launched or refreshed from any point along a timeline. Delphix affords businesses the maximum flexibility to create rich non-production environments for reporting, development, test, staging, or break-fix while reducing overall datacenter costs and complexity.

delphix server

Delphix Server with TimeFlow technology offers many benefits:

Reduce database storage requirements by 10x
Reduce database provisioning times from days to minutes
Enable near real-time database refreshes
Perform break-fix analysis with greater granularity (down to the second) and speed
Enhance existing backup solutions with the ability to launch archived databases in minutes
Reduce the number of organizational touch points required to provision new or archived databases.

Delphix virtualization helps businesses safely and efficiently accelerate improvements that are critical for today's businesses. With Delphix, businesses can reduce project timelines and costs, while offloading production database workloads. Better yet, Delphix can dramatically shrink database hardware power, cooling, footprint, and costs through consolidation—perhaps the largest area of savings available in many datacenters. To learn more, contact us at sales@delphix.com.

Delphix Server Technology

Delphix Server has three key technology components:

Database Virtualization: abstracts database snapshots and log files to present a fully functional, high-performance, read/write virtual database to the database server;
Storage Optimization: efficiently manages the underlying storage to minimize the amount of capacity necessary in a shared VDB environment;
Management: web UI enables self-service VDB provisioning and ongoing management.

delphix server technology

1. Database Virtualization

Delphix links, shrinks, and loads the source database into the Delphix Server and its assigned storage repository using patent-pending SnapSync technology. SnapSync links to production databases via standard APIs, with no need to install client agents. Once linked, it maintains synchronization with production databases on a policy basis, usually once a day. Delphix employs an "incremental forever" approach, where only changed blocks of a database are requested and sent to the Delphix Server. After the initial load with SnapSync, the repeated syncs only require incremental changes—with no need to repeat a full load, ever.

When a Delphix Server receives changed data from a physical database, it uses patent-pending TimeFlow technology to synthesize those blocks into a current snapshot of the database. All TimeFlow snapshots stored in a Delphix Server can be instantly provisioned as VDBs, allowing administrators to provision VDBs from any point along the retained timeline. Unlike backup approaches, Delphix does not require restore to an alternate location before a database can be used; VDBs can be instantly provisioned and used as full read/write copies from Delphix itself.

In addition, TimeFlow and SnapSync can be augmented with LogSync. LogSync ships, archives, and applies log changes to TimeFlow. With LogSync, VDBs can be launched from any point along a timeline—down to the second—by applying changes to logs to the last retained snapshot. With LogSync, VDBs can be provisioned or refreshed in near real-time from production databases.

Delphix also serves as a Tier 2 cache and can reduce spindle movements by servicing I/O requests within shared memory; this benefit gets magnified by consolidation, when multiple VDBs draw from the same cached blocks. Delphix solves the contention between consolidation and performance with AQuoS, a patent-pending Adaptive Quality of Service algorithm that allows administrators to set minimum Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees—without binding resources to individual virtual databases (VDBs).

2. Storage Optimization

Delphix uses intelligent block management, intelligent block sizing, compression, de-duplication, and database filtering technologies to significantly reduce the amount of physical storage used by virtual databases. Delphix Server reduces storage requirements by up to 70% on the initial load of source databases and can achieve reductions of up to 90-95% for each incremental VDB provisioned.

3. Management

Delphix includes a web GUI that provides management for all the VDBs in an environment, allowing administrators or end users to quickly provision, customize, and monitor VDBs from a single pane of glass.

Delphix Server installs as a software appliance in minutes on industry standard x86 servers and uses direct attached or SAN storage. Organizations may also choose to run Delphix Server as a virtual appliance running on VMware ESX Server. Delphix Server supports target databases running Oracle 10 and 11 on Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX. To learn more, contact us at sales@delphix.com.

Delphix LogSync

Time Machine for Databases

Mission critical databases constantly process important transactions—invoices, bills, customer data, etc. As a result, businesses employ several methods to safeguard data, including storage snapshots, internal database recovery mechanisms, and replication. Storage array and database recovery mechanisms, however, are prohibitively expensive, limiting the window of retention and coverage for data loss.

Delphix provides a powerful way to extend both physical and logical availability of databases and mission critical data. With LogSync, a Delphix Server can be configured to stay Syncronized within seconds of a source database, by shipping and storing changes to database logs. In addition, LogSync enables highly granular recovery—any source database can be easily recovered to a point along a timeline using Delphix's TimeFlow technology—down to the second. If an application crashes or if a table is accidentally dropped, Delphix users can quickly and easily provision a virtual database (VDB) immediately prior to the loss, greatly facilitating data recovery or root-cause analysis.

LogSync works in coordination with SnapSync to ensure both physical and logical recovery of data. LogSync communicates via standard database APIs and interfaces, while ensuring full end-to-end transactional consistency. Once LogSync has been activated as an add-on service, users can provision VDBs from any point in time within the retention period. When provisioning, Delphix automatically applies the appropriate snapshot and logs.

There are tradeoffs to consider when provisioning via logs; the time it takes to process logs and open the database depends on the volume of changes since the last snapshot. Service levels for availability are often categorized by RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective). RTO counts the time it takes to recover data from a failure. RPO, however, counts the frequency of capture and hence the amount of data that may be lost since the last recovery point. With SnapSync and LogSync, the RPO and RTO are as follows:

SnapSync RPO: daily or a few times a day
SnapSync RTO: seconds or minutes
LogSync RPO: full transactional granularity
LogSync RTO: seconds to hours, depending on log change volume.

Delphix Administrators should consider the service levels required when setting SnapSync and LogSync policies and take into account LogSync latencies when provisioning VDBs. To learn more, contact us at sales@delphix.com.

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