With all due respect to The Bard, database administrators face a “to be or not to be” question each day. What’s the point of creating backups if you can’t restore your data? And what if you perform these backups only to realize that you can’t restore quickly enough to solve a business problem?
Consider this example: Your business relies on a particular set of applications for things like order processing, databases, or your website. If these go down, your business grinds to a halt. So you grab your last backup, initiate a recovery, then experience a rude awakening when it takes five days to fully recover your data or application.
Five. Full. Days.
After that much time, you’re likely hemorrhaging costs or even going out of business. So, why did you back up in the first place?
This isn’t so much a backup problem as it is a recovery problem. And it gets worse. The accelerating pace of digital transformation is creating more and more data. And all that data needs to be backed up and recovered.
There’s more: Cybersecurity Ventures expects global cybercrime costs to grow by 15% per year over the next five years. It will reach $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, up from $3 trillion in 2015. This has significant implications for data recovery.
A large, successful cyberattack could mean a large-scale restore. This is a challenge all infrastructure professionals face, from data-protection specialists to admins managing applications and databases. Think about it: How long would it take you to recover all of your applications and databases?
Many organizations that use a data-protection product have attempted to solve this problem. They may have tried storage snapshot integration, synthetic full backups, or other fixes. But not everyone uses a data-protection product for all of their workloads. That’s often the case for database backup and recovery where scripting remains supreme.
While every data protection product has agents or clients for protecting databases, DBAs often have a unique skill for writing backup and recovery scripts for their enterprise databases. This scripted approach is very flexible, but it can further increase the recovery challenge as scripts don’t have the same features as a data-protection product. DBAs often rely on the hardware to perform some of the tasks such as deduplication that data protection software performs. But like data protection software, hardware solutions have focused on solving the backup problem, not the recovery problem.
Help Is at Hand
Pure Storage® FlashBlade® has helped many organizations solve the recovery problem. Its All-flash, scale-out architecture delivers multi-terabyte per hour backup speeds and recovery performance at scale. In fact, as FlashBlade scales out, its performance improves.
FlashBlade uses industry-standard storage protocols (SMB, NFS, and S3) so it’s a great choice for SQL DBAs. SQL scripts can easily read and write to a FlashBlade SMB share. The Purity//FB 3.2 release includes updates to FlashBlade’s SMB implementation, resulting in significant performance improvements.
Figure 1: FlashBlade backup and restore speeds using the SMB protocol.
Enhanced Data Protection
In addition to high-performance backup and recovery for mission-critical SQL databases, SQL DBAs can use Pure SafeMode™ snapshots for an increased level of protection from ransomware attacks or rogue administrators. SafeMode snapshots operate as a “set-and-forget” feature and come with the Purity operating environment for FlashBlade. If SQL backups become compromised, you can easily recover them using SafeMode snapshots. Coupled with the performance FlashBlade delivers, your mission-critical SQL databases will be back up and running in no time.
With FlashBlade, you can address backup and recovery, so that you can be confident your data and your business are truly protected.
Download our white paper to learn more about using FlashBlade for fast and secure SQL backups.
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