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Solution Showcase

Protecting and Leveraging Database
Environments with Cohesity
Date: November 2019 Author: Christophe Bertrand, Senior Analyst
Abstract: Databases, traditional and modern NoSQL databases, are core to an organization’s operations. Growing datasets, combined with their dependency on legacy point solutions that were not designed to support these large swathsof data, are making it complex and cost-prohibitive for organizations to effectively manage and protect these critical
data sets. They need to reconsider their data management and protection strategies with a solution like Cohesity.

Overview
Mission-critical or high-priority applications and their data increasingly are the business for many organizations. If thebusiness runs into any issues with them, everything stops. ESG research shows that loss of customer confidence, direct lossof revenue, and missed business opportunity are the top three most-cited direct consequences of application downtime. 1
To continue meeting the demands of today’s modern enterprises, IT organizations need to consider the many facets ofavailability for their critical environments, including evaluating their strategy to protect, predictably recover, and reuse
data. A few challenges arise immediately as IT leaders consider the ramifications of the complexity of their mission-criticalinfrastructure against a backdrop of seemingly unstoppable data growth: the higher level of dependency on databases
such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, and the increased adoption of modern NoSQL databases like MongoDB,
CouchDB, and Hbase that run within the same environment.
When it comes to data availability and protection, service levels are paramount. Half of surveyed organizations expect noor less than 15 minutes of downtime, or recovery time objective (RTO), for high-priority applications when incidents
happen, which includes key databases (see Figure 1). Many legacy solutions – 1) cannot protect all these data sources on asingle platform and 2) cannot deliver against these stringent requirements. The amount of lost data, or recovery point
objective (RPO), is similarly low—meaning that there is little data loss tolerance—with nearly a third of organizations
reporting a tolerance of “lost data” below the 10 minutes bar for high-priority data. 2
The variety of approaches IT professionals typically leverage to protect their critical applications and databases, often incombination, include backup and replication software, storage systems with replication mechanisms, and hyperconverged
appliances and solutions.
Protection is the first step. Organizations today are data-centric: data is the product, which provides insight or helps increating services to complement tangible goods. Recent ESG research shows that over 52% of organizations plan to1
2

Source: ESG Master Survey Results, Real-world SLAs and Availability Requirements, May 2018.
ibid.
This ESG Solution Showcase was commissioned by Cohesity and is distributed under license from ESG.
© 2019 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Solution Showcase: Protecting and Leveraging Database Environments with Cohesity2

develop new data-centric products by 2021. 3 Leveraging data for business outcomes beyond backup and recovery has
become more critical in the past few years. These use cases include compliance, cybersecurity testing, DevOps support,
analytics, and enhanced disaster recovery testing and resiliency. DevOps is cited among the top three most potentially
impactful secondary data reuse scenarios. 4

Figure 1. Priority Applications Have Stringent Data Protection SLAs
What is the amount of downtime your organization can tolerate from servers running “high priority”
and "normal" workloads before making the decision to “failover/recover” to a BC/DR secondary site orservice provider? (Percent of respondents, N=320)
Typical amount of tolerable downtime for “high priority” applications
Typical amount of tolerable downtime for “normal” production workloads

36%
21%19%

14%

13%
6%

20%
14%

13%
6%

4%

8%
1%

6%

2%

6%

2%

6%

1% 1%Less than 15 15 minutes 1 hour to 2 hours to 4 hours to 6 hours to 12 hours to More than Don’t know
No24 hours
downtime minutes to less than less than 2 less than 4 less than 6 less than 12 24 hours
hours
hours
hours
hours
1 hourever
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group

Protecting Database Environments with Cohesity
ESG research clearly shows that organizations need to place the ability to predictably recover their data at the heart oftheir data protection strategy. With data growing exponentially and budget constraints to contend with, organizations arelooking for new ways to deliver coherent and consistent RPOs and RTOs for their key database environments. To do so,they need a platform that “understands” and provides best-in-class capabilities not just for one but for a large variety of
mission-critical workloads, on-premises or in the cloud. This includes distributed databases like Hadoop and NoSQL, forexample.
That’s where Cohesity’s data management platform helps. Inspired by web-scale architecture, Cohesity’s software-definedsolution replaces legacy data and infrastructure silos including backup software, target storage, media, and master servers
as well as cloud gateways. In addition, it comes with a wide set of APIs and integrates with key mission-critical databases
commonly found in enterprises. Cohesity is “cloud-native” by design and integrates with Amazon Web Services, Google
Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure for cloud-native workload protection, long-term retention, and tiering. It also
eliminates unnecessary data copies, allowing end-users to leverage backup data for other uses such as application
development, compliance, and security.

34Source: ESG Master Survey Results, From Data Backup to Data Intelligence, to be published.
ibid.
© 2019 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Solution Showcase: Protecting and Leveraging Database Environments with Cohesity

3Let’s review some of the popular databases the Cohesity platform can help with.

OracleCohesity is integrated with key components at the heart of Oracle, such as Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN), to provide
application-consistent incremental forever backup and granular recovery for both Oracle single instance and realapplication clusters (RAC). This allows end-users to not only deliver against stringent RPOs and RTOs but also linearly scaleout performance by simply adding nodes to the cluster, a great advantage in the context of the massive amounts of datathat need to be protected. Cohesity provides options—for backups and recovery. The extent of this flexibility is a key
component of a modern data management solution. It’s important to be able to recover rapidly. It’s equally important torecover on your terms, accommodating your unique infrastructure needs. Cohesity provides a range of recovery options
including overwrite, alternate site recovery, point-in-time, and granular recovery. Additionally, users can determine thelevel of performance they need with configurable multi-node and multi-channel support for RAC.

Microsoft SQL ServerCohesity simplifies protecting SQL Server databases and their corresponding log files. For flexibility, Cohesity offers twoapproaches for protecting SQL: native SQL backup or leveraging Cohesity’s connectors that offer CBT incremental forever
backups. The solution leverages Microsoft volume shadow copy services (VSS).
Designed for delivering predictable recovery, Cohesity allows instant and granular database-level recovery to any point andlocation. A deep solution, Cohesity allows rapid database migration, without the need for log shipping.

SAP HANASAP HANA requires no introduction. It can be deployed and therefore protected in the cloud or on-premises. Cohesity
provides a certified integration with SAP HANA (SAP Backint API) and is implemented as an agent running inside HANA. This
allows SAP Admins to continue using their existing SAP processes and tools such as HANA Studio, DBA Cockpit, or HANASQL, while Backup Admins can use Cohesity for simplified protection of HANA’s data.

Distributed Databases
Distributed databases have become a critical component of modern enterprise infrastructures. They present IT leaderswith a unique set of challenges for data management and protection based on the highly distributed and dynamic natureof the architecture and the number and size of data volumes. Backing up and recovering modern databases requires new
approaches and techniques to ensure consistency and the ability to meet SLAs as well as support for a broad ecosystemsuch as MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchbaseDB, and HBase and Hadoop Distributed FS variants including Cloudera andHortonworks. Key capabilities include application-consistent backups with granular, point-in-time recovery; critical logical
database-level backups (versus node-level); and leveraging global variable-length deduplication and compression in theprocess.

The Bigger Truth: Backup Is Just a Start
As organizations digitally transform, they need to do more than just backup and recovery. While data protection is abusiness-critical effort, more can be done to leverage data assets to support new business opportunities or mitigate risks.
For example, regulatory compliance, accelerated application testing and development, and data analytics to support
business insights are additional objectives that organizations seek to achieve to optimize their investments in data
infrastructure. In order to do so, they need secure and easy access to “fresh,” relevant, and compliant data in a way that isunified.
© 2019 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Solution Showcase: Protecting and Leveraging Database Environments with Cohesity

4To achieve these objectives, they need a platform that gives them data reusability and a way to simplify and streamline themanagement of data assets across all database systems, with a scale-out, distributed platform that addresses the many
variations in applications and technologies.
That’s why they should take a close look at the Cohesity solution.

All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group(ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change. This publication is copyrighted byThe Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise topersons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to anaction for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at 508.482.0188.

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