MySQL - and by extension Sun's sales force - are going to start peddling Zmanda's open source backup and recovery software written especially for MySQL to the enterprise.

Starting April 1, MySQL Enterprise customers will be able to buy subscriptions to Zmanda's Recovery Manager for MySQL and MySQL Cluster directly from Sun worldwide. The software is already available for download for free at http://www.mysql.com/zrm.

The agreement, coming only days after Sun closed on its billion-dollar acquisition of MySQL, is a boon for the start-up, which previously only had a loose marketing deal with MySQL under which little Zmanda and its two salesman had to do all the selling and fulfillment.

CEO Chander Kant calls the arrangement a "game changer" for Zmanda. Now all he's got to do is persuade Sun to push Zmanda into backup situations where it currently pushes Veritas. Zmanda is simpler than Veritas - with maybe 80% of the bells and whistles - and a lot cheaper. It's also consistent with Sun's current open source strategy.

Zmanda for MySQL runs $300 a year per user with e-mail support during working hours. It's console-based and works on Solaris 10 and Linux.

It offers point-in-time recovery, local and remote configuration support and a graphical MySQL log analyzer that pinpoints unwanted events and actions.

It has a plug-in architecture that supports Solaris ZFS snapshots, Linux LVM, Windows VSS snapshots, Network Appliance snapshots and Veritas VxFS enabling DBAs to create quicker, more consistent backup images of a live MySQL database.