Unitrends Integrated Backup and Recovery of Microsoft SQL Server Environments

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1 Solution Brief Unitrends Integrated Backup and Recovery of Microsoft SQL Server Environments Summary Your business infrastructure relies on your Microsoft SQL Servers. Your business no matter the size can t afford to lose an entire day s worth of data. The ability to not only backup your data but to also quickly and thoroughly restore this data is critically important to the survival and continued successful operation of your business. Unitrends Recovery Series appliances and Unitrends Enterprise Backup bridge the gap between virtual, physical, and cloud protection and offer optimal data management for your environment with a unique simply scalable architecture that is as easy to get started as This solution brief will demonstrate the following: 2. How to leverage Unitrends offerings to ensure data protection 3. Protecting 2008, 2012, and Protect data without limiting application availability

2 2 The Challenge In today s business world, there are progressively greater challenges on a data center to not only be highly reliable and effective, but also flexible to meet the changing demands. Increasingly, businesses, regardless of its size and stature, are relying on Microsoft SQL Server as their comprehensive database server and information platform, which offers enterprise-ready technologies and tools helping those businesses get the most from their information at the lowest cost-of-ownership. SQL Server has also become the key player as the database of choice for mission-critical data protection, and becoming increasingly more integral and significant as the demands grow. The need most certainly, the requirement to safeguard your business information and to protect your databases and application data from a database failure has become not only increasingly difficult, but also increasingly crucial. In today s business environment, it is not enough to prevent the loss of or access to your data by simply recovering a database file; you must be able to recover the information from a known point to ensure that all records are synchronized so that your business is back up and running to the closest point of failure as possible in the shortest period of time. The outmoded methods for backup and restore can no longer meet today s growing challenges for data protection. To ensure you protect your data and information and quickly recover to maintain your business flow, it is essential that you create and enable a data protection backup and recovery strategy that combines high integrity periodic checkpoints, complete backups without corruption, compliance to industry-related regulations, and ultimately resulting in disaster recovery. The Solution An effective data protection strategy optimizes data management and enables immediate responses to business needs. Simplify the protection of with Unitrends which works by leveraging application logic providing secure, data management and disaster recovery. No need to purchase, deploy, and manage multiple systems. Unitrends provides everything your growing business needs to protect Microsoft SQL Server in a single, robust offering. Exceeding Customer Needs: Addressing the Pain Points Your business relies on mission-critical SQL databases for applications handling CRM, online transaction processing, etc. Mission-critical databases are defined as systems crucial to the business operations of the organization such that interruption in service (downtime) for these systems would result in lost revenue, service interruptions for customers, or measurable productivity losses for employees. Based on this definition, customer case studies demonstrated on average that 57% of their Microsoft SQL Server databases were characterized as mission critical the deployment of databases for new Web applications was growing at 34% per year. (From: Comparative Study on the Total Cost of Administration (TCA).) As your company grows, more data is stored, databases are larger. With increased size, there are increased costs to administer and manage these databases. With the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry, your Unitrends appliance is licensed to seamlessly scale with your business. As you grow, simply add an additional appliance or storage to your network. High level of data backup and recovery is required to protect infrastructure of business operations. A backup and restore component is an essential safeguard for protecting critical data stored in your Microsoft SQL Server databases. Unitrends protects your servers, operating systems, and applications. Our pioneering technology gives you complete recovery flexibility, so a system failure will never hold back your business

3 3 Backups and restores are required to be more reliable and completed faster. Back up more often and recover any database across multiple instances in minutes. Providing incremental backups (as often as every 60 seconds), speedy restore of failed systems (within minutes), and off-site storage for your protected data and systems should be part of your protection strategy. You want simple, easy data protection solution that lowers administrative costs. Management software to simplify and optimize Microsoft SQL data storage, according to business requirements. Unitrends technology supports scaling up and scaling out and utilizes an adaptive and easy to use, web-based user interface to manage all aspects of data protection. Compression and deduplication of redundant data is required to reduce storage costs. Unitrends offers compression and deduplication across multiple storage devices via advanced storage virtualization and thin provisioning capabilities that are built in to our virtual appliances. The Unitrends Advantage Your, physical or virtual, is used both as a fundamental building block of SharePoint as well as a directly as SQL-based database infrastructure. Implemented on a single server or in a distributed fashion for higher scalability, you must be able to perform native, GOS block, and HOS backup depending on your deployment. However, across scalable, distributed implementations native backup is the recommended technique, typically producing higher integrity backups due to the ability to ensure resynchronization of the log chain through full backups before moving on to delta and transaction backups. In addition, with native backup, you can achieve deeper integration with your clustered implementations which allows for location transparency on failover by accessing data through the clustered node. Unitrends delivers next-generation enterprise-class data protection for by providing: Incremental Forever Backup. Near-continuous data protection using World class RPO (Recovery Point Objectives) where backups can be performed as often as once every 60 seconds. Instant recovery. Failover virtualization enables instant recovery in less than five minutes. If your system fails, Unitrends appliance becomes the virtual host of the failed system. Improve Recovery Time Objective (RTO). By protecting your operating systems and applications, you dramatically reduce the time required to restore your computer systems. Archiving. Disk, tape (if hypervisor supports it), network attached storage (NAS), and SAN rotational and fixed archiving of tertiary backups is built-in and works alone and with replication. Replication and Disaster Recovery. Single-tenant and multi-tenant replication is supported both in a private cloud as well as our public cloud service. Global deduplication and Change Block Tracking (CBT). Compression and deduplication across multiple storage devices via Unitrends advanced storage virtualization and thin provisioning capabilities are builtin to our virtual appliances, with CBT eliminating any redundant data. Virtual SQL Server Backup Unitrends protects SQL Server in virtual environments at the hypervisor level. Features of ourhypervisor level virtual protection of SQL Server include: Full/Differential, Full/Incremental or Forever incremental backup schedules. Decreased RPOs through integration with VMware vsphere Changed Block Tracking. Near-zero RTOs through VMware and Hyper-V Instant Recovery. Application consistency and transaction log truncation.

4 4 Recovery Assurance Unitrends offers recovery assurance for deep virtual and physical SQL environments via our auditing technology and complete automation and orchestration at the application- and operating system-level for VMware and Hyper-V with our ReliableDR recovery assurance and disaster recovery product. Environmentally Adaptive User Interface Our technology offers an intuitive drag-and-drop web-based user interface for managing all aspects of data protection. One window, all of your backups: View and manage an unlimited number of Unitrends appliances, storage systems, and client computers from a single pane of glass. Job management and scheduler: Easily toggle between completed, current, and scheduled jobs. Initiate an immediate backup, or create a recurring backup schedule. Backup status at-a-glance: A color-coded calendar quickly shows you the status of each week s backup jobs. One-click restore: Restore your most recent backup with a click, or select a point-in-time from which to restore. Graphical reporting: Choose from detailed reports showing your Unitrends appliances and their licensed capacity, your client systems, and the statuses of backups, failures, restores, and replication. Flexible Data Protection Strategies/Flexible Recovery Strategies Unitrends offer fully customizable configurations of backup strategies including full/full, full/differential, full/ incremental, and completely create it yourself strategies as well. And we don t limit you to single server job scheduling nor do we force you to use multiple server job scheduling we offer both. Instant spin-up recovery? Yes. Instant granular recovery? Yes. But that s not all. Similar and dissimilar physical and virtual bare metal allow you to perform P2P, V2P, P2V, and V2V recovery. Cloud-based Protection Unitrends Cloud and Disaster Recovery Services integrate your on-premise Unitrends appliance with our multitenancy cloud-based architecture or with your organization s own private cloud. Our web-based interface is your point of control for your cloud-based backups R Express Edition MSDE Figure 1: Unitrends Support of

5 5 Built in Data Encryption Unitrends InCrypt uses AES 256-bit encryption to provide secure backups with unbreakable protection. Customizable Licensing: Unlimited, Granular Your Unitrends appliance is licensed to seamlessly scale with your business. As you grow, simply add an additional appliance to your network. USE CASE 1: Unitrends Backup/Recovery of The Ease of SQL Integration Unitrends provides complete protection for as part of its comprehensive, all-in-one licensing model. Unitrends supports backup and recovery for the versions of listed in figure 1. Management tasks can be directly performed, such as point in time recovery with transaction log backups, automated at short intervals between backups (i.e. transaction log backup every hour or as often as once every 60 seconds). The VSS-based SQL Server Agent supports Full, Differential, and Transaction Log backups. Full and Differential backups are performed using Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) snapshots. Transaction Log backups are performed using the Virtual Device Interface (VDI). When Unitrends creates a backup, a checkpoint is created which enables the reuse of the portions of the log file, but does not explicitly shrink the size of the database or log file. When the checkpoint is performed, the inactive portion of the transaction log is marked as reusable: BACKUP LOG database without any option performs checkpoint and makes the log file available for reuse, but it does not shrink the file, if the file has already grown in size. (GB: see One way to keep the log files from growing too much is to run more frequent full backups. With more frequent full backups the log is being truncated more frequently and the log doesn t have time to grow and fill up the disk. A second option is to run a shrink operation via a maintenance plan before a full backup is scheduled to run. ( The VSS-based Unitrends Agent supports restore of Full, Differential and Transaction Log backups. Management of the database and logs can be completed with the Enterprise Manager or the Unitrends Agent. Only one of the two methods should be used to avoid checkpoint confusion. When a failure occurs it is possible that the service will not start to allow application specific restores. If that occurs one of the two methods discussed must be used to obtain a working master database before restores can be performed. USE CASE 2: Continuous Backup Protection and Archiving Data Unitrends archiving and replication provide data retention policies and align to your needs. In addition, Unitrends can grow archives non-disruptively and on demand, automated data migration and leverage standards-based access to archives. Data protection also requires you to decide whether you want your rotational media on-premise storage (disk, tape, NAS, SAN) or off-site (private or public cloud), or do you want a combination of both. In addition, you will be able to monitor and manage the archiving medium from a centralized console using the easy-to-use yet sophisticated user interface, from where you can automate incremental backups (even as often as once every 60 seconds) to minimize network traffic and protect your network s performance. Once your backups are performed, you can archive and replicate the protected data:

6 6 Cloud: Replicate your data to Unitrends multitenant cloud service. In the event of a disaster, Unitrends guarantees next-day shipping of a new, fully loaded appliance. Electronic replication: Schedule replication of your protected data from your primary site to your disaster recovery site. If you have available bandwidth, set up cross repilcation: replicate between two or more sites, with each site acting as a DR site for the other. Rotational archiving: Archive your protected data to disk or tape, and then rotate the disk off-site. Service Level Agreement: Unitrends can help customers meet their SLAs based on customer recovery time objectives. USE CASE 3: Simplify Data Protection Unitrends deduplication and compression technology is designed for ease of use, limits network impact, and is optimized to ensure that protected data is available for immediate recovery through the use of an environmentally adaptive web-based user interface that supports scaling up and scaling out, without scaling down to lower the learning curve of less experienced users. No additional hardware required: Unitrends data reduction technology is built into every Unitrends appliance as well as utilizes your existing infrastructure for Unitrends Enterprise Backup Minimal processing overhead: Unitrends adapts its deduplication function to the amount of disk space, memory, and processing power available. To protect the performance of the source machine, processing takes place on the Unitrends appliance. Optimized for speedy data recovery: To keep the backup window as short as possible, Unitrends completes each backup job before beginning deduplication. Data is quickly protected and available in the event that a restore is required. Unitrends adaptive deduplication occurs at the byte-level and is coupled with inline, bit-level compression. A Comprehensive SQL Server Data Protection Solution The Use Cases referenced in this brief outline how Unitrends protects. For comprehensive protection, Unitrends provides flexible data protection stratgeies. Depending on your needs, Unitrends offers all inclusive Microsoft SQL protection with our all-in-one appliances as well as our capacity-based licenings on Unitrends Enterprise Backup. File based backups are essential to backup/restore of. The data and log files associated with the databases should be excluded from the file level backup unless the Service is stopped prior to the backup being taken. Application specific backup for must be taken if the database cannot be stopped for backup. Unitrends ensures complete data protection and proper database/log management when leveraging our agent. About Unitrends Unitrends delivers award-winning business recovery solutions for any IT environment. The company s portfolio of virtual, physical and cloud solutions provides adaptive protection for organizations globally. To address the complexities facing today s modern data center, Unitrends delivers end-to-end protection and instant recovery of all virtual and physical assets as well as automated disaster recovery testing built for virtualization. With the industry s lowest total cost of ownership, Unitrends offerings are backed by a customer support team that consistently achieves a 98 percent satisfaction rating. Visit. Ready to see Unitrends in action? Watch us crash a server and restore it: /product-demo