1. SnapCenter helps you to do data protection and data management of multiple applications / databases from a single GUI interface.
2. You dont have to install and configure snapdrive and SMO/ SMSQL for each database server for protecting databases. In SnapCenter ( SC), It automatically pushes the plugin and configures it for you from a central server
3. ROLE Based access control was missing in SMO/SDU which is present in SnapCenter
4. You dont require dedicated oracle database to storage SMO metadata repository details. In SnapCenter, we packaged open-source mysql database to hold the metadata.
5. You cannot group multiple databases as a dataset with a policy for a backup in SMO. In SnapCenter, it is possible via resource groups where you can group any number of databases at a time for backup.
6. Visibility of Backups and clone in your Datacenter - if you have multiple datacenters like DC, NDR or Far DR with different set of storage systems for backups and DR, you can easily protect backups across sites, spot them and manage backups across your infrastructures via snapcenter using intuitive topology based management.
7. Dashboard, Backup reports, simplified patching and upgradation, RBAC, Job monitoring, triaging, browsing live logs - all in single place
8. Enhanced Scale and performance - There was vol & lun limits with SMO/SDU which is lifted in snapcenter.
9. support for Cloud protection ( cloud volumes ONTAP), Burst to cloud (DEV/ Test). seamlessly protect, manage backups and clone wherever you want in you preferred hyperscalar cloud ( AWS ,Azure, GCP)
10.Multi-tenancy support ( CDB / PDB) - From Oracle 21c onwards, there is no support for legacy architecture (non-CDB). SMO doesnt support this new architecture. Only snapcenter can handle this. we support restores at individual PDB level and can clone PLUGGABLE databases (PDB) from one Container database to another. No storage vendor or backup software can support this today. As per Oracle, you save on licenses as customers move to oracle multi-tenant architecture and snapcenter provides you the best services.
11. support for Point-in time restores for tablespaces, pdbs and PDB tablespaces is supported only in snapcenter
11. you can Configure HA and DR for snapcenter server for load balancing and address DR scenarios.
12. SnapCenter supports 4 different interfaces - GUI, REST, Linux CLI, Powershell
13. ENhanced Oracle RAC awareness - You can configure backup hosts and seamlessly failover when one node goes down
14. SnapCenter supports Oracle active data guard Backups and clone, third party clustering technologies
15.SnapCenter provides enhanced security (IPSEC, SSL Certificates based communication, Sudo based authentication to Linux host, Active Directory integration and many more) which SMO lacked.
To summarize, SnapCenter supports all features that was present in SMO and way beyond it. Please talk to your local NDA rep to get you started.
Here is the snapcenter playlist to checkout various demos of snapcenter. you can see few of my oracle demos out there :
SnapCenter - YouTube
