Introducing Arcserve Backup Agents and Options › Using Agents › Agent for Oracle (Linux) › Introducing the Agent for Oracle › Agent Features

Agent Features

The agent offers the following features that help improve backup and restore performance:

• Fully Integrated with RMAN--The agent is fully integrated with Recovery Manager (RMAN), an Oracle utility that lets you back up, restore, and recover databases. Using the agent user interface, you can access all RMAN options for the backup, restore, and recovery operations. The agent generates RMAN scripts to perform the desired operation, and lets you save and identify the RMAN scripts that are generated. For more information about Recovery Manager, see the Oracle documentation.
• Cross Product Interoperability--The agent lets you perform a restore through RMAN even if you performed a backup using the agent. Alternatively, you can perform a restore using the agent if you had performed the backup using RMAN.
• Multistreaming--The agent uses the RMAN parallel input/output capabilities, namely multistreaming through multiple channels. In addition, the agent derives other capabilities from RMAN such as load-balancing among channels and node affinity and channel failover in RAC environments.
• Staging--The agent lets you perform a staging backup job of multiple Oracle RMAN database instances in a single job.
• Media Maximization--The agent uses media maximization to help optimize tape usage in GFS Rotation jobs and ensure that any wasted space on these tapes will be minimized.
• Cross Platform Backups--The agent can back up Oracle databases on Agent Technology platforms to Arcserve Backup servers running on Windows platforms. This capability provides centralized backups.