In today’s data-driven world, the amount of data and workload that enterprises handle on a daily basis continue to increase. As a result, scaling backup and recovery strategies have never been more critical.
In this article, we’ll discuss some of the top scalable backup and recovery strategies for enterprise databases, including hyperscale databases in Azure SQL Database, tiered storage, and scaling methods like sharding, vertical scaling, and horizontal scaling. In addition, we’ll explore backup and recovery solutions that are specially designed to accommodate the needs of an enterprise’s constantly growing volumes of data.
Introduction
As data volumes grow, businesses require backup and recovery strategies that can accommodate large amounts of data and workloads with efficiency. With the rising number of distributed workforces, shrinking backup windows, and increasing capacity of unstructured data, the need for scalable backup and recovery strategies only becomes more urgent.
Scaling backups and recovery strategies enable IT organizations to secure the smooth operation of their systems effectively. It ensures the availability of valuable data while maintaining an ideal recovery point that guards against data loss.
In this article, we will explore the following:
* Scalable Backup and Recovery Strategies
* Scaling Methods
* Backup and Recovery Solutions
* Conclusion##Scalable Backup and Recovery Strategies
Enterprises are increasingly relying on distributed workforces, which puts pressure on shrinking backup windows. Managing and handling data backup and recovery operations in an enterprise environment requires scalability and efficiency, which traditional backup solutions alone may not meet.
One solution is tiered storage, where the device is scaled out to share backup workloads when data volume increases. With this approach, you place performance tiers of primary disk storage based on the data value and access frequency appropriately. Thus, you can optimize performance and costs.
Modern hyperscale databases in Azure SQL Database is designed to save time and reduce costs for backup and recovery operations completely. For example, Azure SQL Database offers automated backup and restore operations pushed down to the storage layer, eliminating resource consumption on compute replicas and reducing storage and restore times. Hyperscale databases provide advantages such as better redundancy and scalability by distributing data across many fault domains and synchronization across hybrid container platforms like Kubernetes.
For enterprises that use NoSQL or unstructured data, scaling methods such as sharding are popular. Sharding is the process of horizontally scaling databases to distribute data over a network of multiple servers. This approach keeps duplicate data across servers and is the core concept of de-normalization and schema-less design, which may lead to an improvement in processing power of virtual machines and dissimilar hardware.
Moreover, this approach achieves fault tolerance across distributed backup servers, which provides better performance in case of device failure. Synchronization and replication between distributed backup servers streamline backup and recovery operations as well.
Backup and Recovery Solutions
IT organizations require centralized administration, the latest technology, and safe growth to protect their valuable data and systems today and into the future. Disk-based data protection solutions accomplished these. It involves the backup and retention of system recovery points and data backups in relatively cheap, fast, and redundant media servers with flexible retention tiers.
In addition to this, granular recovery technology provides flexibility in data restoration to recover only a desired subset of data and system files, evading the need to restore the entire database.
ExaGrid, one such data protection company, offers a tiered backup storage solution with a five-year price protection guarantee, providing the best of both worlds in terms of performance and low cost.
To ensure the security of data backups, it is essential to store them at an offsite secure location. Thanks to advancements in backup storage redundancy, storage-as-a-service and continuous data protection, backup and recovery performance of distributed backups server is as efficient as an on-premise solution. And if a disaster strikes, backup and recovery solutions offer an easy and quick way to recover the entire system.
When it comes to backup and recovery performance, centralized administration, efficient disk-based backup, and LAN-free backup solutions make a real difference. These solutions offload data movement from primary servers and workloads and reduce deployment costs.
The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning has shown significant improvement in the scalability of backup and recovery solutions in enterprise databases. These tools are designed to offer intelligent backup and recovery operations with a lower risk of data loss, making them ideal for long-term archival and disaster recovery scenarios.
In comparison with antiquated disk-to-disk-to-tape backup methods of the past, the latest backup and recovery solutions represents a tremendous improvement in scalability, efficiency, and performance while lowering backup storage costs.