Use Netbackup to take backup of EssBase Application

Hi Vsangre,

As of Essbase 9.3.1, There are no tools available that provide integtration between Veritas and Essbase. But Veritas NetBackup can peacefully co-exist with Essbase and be used to backup the Essbase cubes provided you follow a few simple steps. Firstly you will need to determine whether the Essbase application that you wish to backup has any allowable downtime. If there is an allowance for a downtime window that will provide adequate number of minutes to backup the application files using NetBackup then the solution is simple; You would use a MAXL script or ESSCMD script to stop the application. Inside this MAXL / ESSCMD script you must set the application settings to disallow logins. That will prevent subsequent user requests from being accepted and thus forcing the application to start-up again before your down-time window has completed. You then let Veritas do it's job and when the backup has completed, you run another MAXL / ESSCMD script to enable logins and start the application. What files do you backup? Simple. You backup all files in the Essbase\app\<appname> directory. If you are spanning data to other drive partitions or physical volumes then you would need to back up that spanned data as well. To calculate the time required to run the backup using NetBackup, you must add the size of all files in these directories together and use this total number of Mb to determine the time NetBackup will take to do it's job. Please note that ALL files in these directories need to be backed up. It is not possible to safely backup an Essbase database by simply backing up the data on spanned volumes such as the .pag and .ind files. To do so will result in corruption when you attempt to restore.

If you need to backup the application while it is running because you have no allowable downtime window, then there is a more complex solution. please post another question request.

Cheers,
Nicholas