Say hello to AMANDA, a new open source storage app

Perhaps the proprietary nature of most storage hardware is to blame, but we don’t often see open source and storage in the same sentence. That’s unfortunate, because bringing the low acquisition cost of open source applications to, say, storage management would be a welcome change for many companies.

Thankfully, now that the project Aperi is well-entrenched at Eclipse.org (an initial scope of work proposal was made public on August 15), we will probably see those two terms together more often.

My guess is that it will take some time for this controversial open source project to start bearing fruit, but if you just need a robust and powerful backup application, there is much to choose from right now.

Take, for example, AMANDA. Its clever acronym stands for Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver. This is an open source backup application that can consolidate backup streams from multiple machines to a central Linux server over the network.

Fear not if you have Microsoft boxes, because AMANDA can back up shares from just about any Windows OS using Cygwin or Samba.

As its name suggests, AMANDA was initially created at the University of Maryland and has been in the public domain since 1991. AMANDA can count about 20,000 deployments, from universities and research labs, to large companies such as Charles Schwab and Merrill Lynch.

The number of deployments could be even larger because AMANDA has a set of features comparable with those of major commercial backup applications. But as opposed to those pricey competitors, AMANDA doesn’t create backup files in a proprietary format, which means no vendor lock-in. In fact, you could restore files from an AMANDA backup using plain OS tools.

So why is AMANDA less popular than it could be? Because many potential adopters are uncomfortable with the idea of not having a support throat to choke when push comes to shove. Moreover, many corporate policies explicitly prohibit installing applications without a maintenance and support contract. 

If this sounds familiar, allow me to introduce Zmanda, a recently founded company that, to quote from their mission statement, “offers proven and cost-effective open source backup and recovery solutions.”

Zmanda follows a business model that is quite popular in open source and has been proved successful by illustrious examples such as Red Hat. In essence, you subscribe to a yearly maintenance contract with Zmanda — removing the two obstacles to adopting open source software I mentioned above.

If the name of the company is not a sufficient giveaway (A-MANDA, Z-manda, get it?), looking at this wiki should clarify which application is the main target of their support offering.

AMANDA isn’t the only application Zmanda supports, however. In fact, my original conversation with them was to learn about ZRM (Zmanda Recovery Manager) for MySQL, an open source backup application just released this week that extends the benefits of AMANDA to MySQL databases.

Current estimates suggest that there are 10 million (not a typo) installations of MySQL, an impressive number no matter how you cut it. That’s both a statement of the popularity of the OS database and a promising playground for Zmanda business model.

Similar to AMANDA, ZRM can consolidate backups over the network, which has an immediate appeal for DBAs who baby-sit multiple databases. In this first release, the consolidation feature works only for full backups, but future versions should allow consolidation of incremental backups from multiple databases, according to Zmanda.

The ability to restore a database to virtually any point in time is without any doubt the most interesting feature of ZRM. In plain English, this means you have a fail-safe mechanism that will shield your business data from any kind of corruption, including the most subtle and insidious: human error.

How does ZRM bring a MySQL database back in time? The solution is both elegant and simple. It involves applying all the changes recorded in the database log to the last backup taken before the corruption occurred.

Zmanda offers a community version and an enterprise version of ZRM that differ only in the nature and cost of support. No matter which one you choose, you won’t pay a license fee for the application. The enterprise version offers a support contract, whereas the community version has no-cost support options such as forums, wiki, or e-mail.

If your company is already using MySQL, adding ZRM to your shopping list for backup applications will probably be a no-brainer. If you’re not using MySQL, you probably won’t jump on that bandwagon right away. However, knowing that there is a supported open source backup application for MySQL will probably be a further incentive to join those other 10 million adopters.

Join me on The Storage Network with questions or comments.