Protecting Small Databases

A lot of SME’s get concerned about protecting their databases – typically SQL database. The interesting challenge is the fact that they are really small databases having extremely critical data.

While traditionally a standalone tape based backup solution would be considered ideal, it is not so simple. Since a 50-60 GB database normally compresses down to 10-15 GB, it does not deserve that kind of investment into tapes, each of which is capable of holding terabytes. It ends up holding too small a data and therefore costs more per GB.

With the changing times, better options are available depending on what you want to achieve:

A simple backup could help maintain multiple versions and copies and give you old and new recoveries when required. While this gives flexibility of versioning, the recovery process would take some time based on the kind of resources available.

Alternatively, if you are looking for a quick access to your data even after a disaster, replicating –especially mirroring – is the best option. To keep it in economical range, you can use native mirroring capabilities rather than investing in third party tools.

Ace Data Abhraya offers both: Cloud based backup for option 1 and cloud based infrastructure for option 2 with committed recovery SLA. Infact for SQL databases, you can opt for recovery on cloud infrastructure with option of recovering only database or complete server on cloud while enjoying the flexibility of versioning and compliance, and investing very less based on the backup size usage only.

Processing Big Data

While many think it is difficult to manage data beyond a volume, technologists don’t agree with this. Newer technologies keep coming in to handle and process large volume of data. Consider Google search. While you are typing what you want to search, it starts autocompleting for you and starts showing you results as well.

All this is done by using clusters of servers at the backend. Data that goes in is processed by these servers so you get a good pool of processors and memory to take it in. Further to this, the storage network used behind to read/write this data offers a huge choice.

If it is a file based data, you can go for a sale-out NAS. If you have to handle block level data, scale-out SAN options are available. To help the really heavy databases, pure Flash based storage is now available.

Flash based storages help achieve upto a few million IOPS especially when they perform on inline deduplication done in the memory. Scale out storage there ensures that adding more capacity automatically gives you more memory to handle the new IOs and deduplication help control the requirement of storage since it could otherwise go for a big on budget.

How to backup Big Data?

The industry has been struggling a lot with the backups of the data they have been having for long now. Traditional tape based backup solutions seem good only for small size environments now. Though they have been growing in individual capacities and number of slots, better disk based options are pushing them more towards being secondary rather than the primary backup mediums.

Big data needs better care anyway for being big, and perhaps a bit more meaningful than the databases with invoice records or product records. The new technologies like deduplication and better compression algorithms like LZOB and ZLIB are making it more cost effective to back them up by bringing down their size.

What is also important is the cost of retaining this large volume of data and the varied sources of this unstructured data.

Ace Data’s Abhraya Cloud based backup offering resolves this challenge for its customers. Its flexible backup policies allow organizations to keep latest data close to them locally, and send the remaining to a cloud based offering. Being cloud based, they pay for what they backup and not invest on large growth assumptions. Furthermore as the backup grows old, it can be automatically archived to low cost disks reducing the cost of long term retention while ensuring data availability for long time.

The solution is capable of backing up smartphones, mobile laptops, large volumes of file servers apart from backing up the large servers and databases thereby ensuring that all sources of data can be backed up through a single solution.

How to Store and Manage BIG Data?

While I mentioned in my previous blog that any size of data is no problem, I often get questioned upon how to store and manage the huge volumes. This is a typical concern of an enterprise faced with increasing data size.

Storage vendors have seen and known this problem as it grew, and have scaled-up or rather scaled-out to help handle this massive growth. Both NAS and SAN vendors have gone beyond the traditional methods of upgrading the storage infrastructure by adding additional shelves and disks. The challenge that the traditional method has is that you end up upgrading capacity with shelves and disks with limited enhancements in processing power. This ends up in performance reduction.

The Scale-out method helps upgrade the storage by adding new nodes which include processing power, memory and capacity, thereby keeping the overall performance consistent with practically no dip in user experience. This is true for both SAN and NAS based storages. These storages can be expanded to PBs on a single storage, or even a single file system, by simply plugging in a new node. It is viable commercially also, as the cost per GB goes down as you keep adding more nodes.

So don’t worry about handling your Big Data as the storage devices are now available to store them more efficiently.

How much Data is good for business?

When you talk of sources of data generation, there is an endless list. Any business stream would have a long list to show how data is getting generated and how much data is being generated. Often businesses get scared with so much of data as they think handling it is a mammoth task. Indeed it is a mammoth task as it needs good investments and infrastructure to handle it. However, if utilized properly, the benefits are much higher. The way businesses are competing, it would soon become inevitable to handle it carefully.

The more data you have, more opportunity you get to see how your products, services and customers behave. There are many examples of business being able to analyse their data patterns and offer more discounts or value added services to give their customer a delightful experience. The new databases handling this Big Data have come up with Multi Parallel Processing technologies and the new applications to handle unstructured data ensure that even if you have PetaBytes of data, you can still do real time analysis and produce results in nano seconds.

Let us enjoy this new revolution on the way technology and businesses are getting shaped up and reap the benefits of these.

Cloud for Better Management

One big benefit that cloud computing brings in is the hands-off management for the technology user and the internal IT team. When you are hosting applications in-house and build your own infrastructure, you need a lot of expertise in managing the same. You need to have a dedicated application & database manager who is well-qualified to handle this portfolio.

For a large enterprise this may not be a challenge, and they can take care of the staff augmentation challenges. For SMBs though, this could be a big concern. It is for this reason most of them are not able to leverage the benefits of enterprise applications.

Getting the same application on the Cloud brings in the management components with it. A good service provider will ensure that your applications are taken well care of and they are up and running 24x7 with optimal performance. An exceptional service provider would even have a disaster recovery site to ensure smooth operations even if his own Cloud Data Center poses any threat or challenge.