Finding its open source counterpart to Veritas, Sun’s MySQL has signed a resale deal with Zmanda, a backup and recovery tool that has been optimized for MySQL. And not surprisingly, the deal also includes a free tire-kicker, with a trial edition of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) Enterprise Edition freely available from MySQL. Beginning April 1, MySQL will officially resell Zmanda Recovery Manager through its, and more importantly, Sun’s global sales force.

Founded three years ago. Zmanda currently numbers a staff of 50 split between the U.S. and India. The company has followed the same open source business model as MySQL and Red Hat, targeting the same user base, and for the past three months, has been one of the partners also selling products through the Red Hat Exchange marketplace (confusingly, it calls the red hat-sold product Amanda Enterprise Edition). Not surprisingly, Linux is Zmanda’s dominant OS, followed by in order, Solaris, OpenSolaris, along with some Windows. And most relevant for this deal, MySQL is at least 80% of their installed base, followed by Exchange and SQL Server; support of Oracle is on the to-do list. 

ZRM can manage backup and recovery for multiple instances of MySQL remotely from a web-based console. It optimizes the product for MySQL, which is harder than it sounds because MySQL is simply a database management, as opposed to a storage engine. ZRM senses which storage engine is used, and optimizes file management accordingly. It also provides access to MySQL logs with a Google-based interface, which facilitates restore functions. For instance, as MySQL is typically used for website databases, this feature enables you to restore just prior to the occurrence of a denial-of-service attack.

The necessity of MySQL having such a resale deal is a sign that its installed base has mushroomed beyond single database websites (such as ours). MySQL has always provided a database dump utility that could be repurposed or kluged into a backup or replication tool, but it lacks the ease of use or capability for managing multiple instances that ZRM provides.

ZRM’s capability to manage multiple instances of MySQL answers another need – that while MySQL instances don't necessarily handle large workloads, most organizations have lots of them. In fact, most have more instances of MySQL than they are even aware of. That’s because in many cases, MySQL is embedded as part pf a larger web solution. For instance the Joomla content system powering this website, and the Wordpress blog driving our sister site, are both powered by MySQL databases.

And like Linux before it, MySQL has tended to enter through the back door, so even if organizations enforce Oracle as their enterprise standard, chances are many of their web apps are using MySQL. And in most cases, DBAs are not necessarily available to tend to the MySQL instance.

So it was inevitable that MySQL at some point needed a Veritas of its own, and had to finally bundle something. With Sun’s global Salesforce primed to push MySQL into its own accounts, it became necessary. Heck, we’re surprised that Sun just didn’t just go out and buy the darned company.

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