Distributed databases are now a critical aspect of modern infrastructure. Over 61% of enterprises have either implemented or laying out the blueprints to implement distributed databases. The verdict is clear: distributed databases are a fundamental part of the modern IT playbook, and they’re here to stay.
Catalyzing strategic initiatives revolving around agility and flexibility, distributed databases offer benefits; however, the scale and distributed nature of these modern databases make data protection a unique challenge. Backing up and recovering modern databases have a range of unique requirements that legacy multi-point products simply cannot handle, yielding three critical challenges:
- Managing the magnitude of data volumes
- Navigating a dynamic and distributed architecture
- Ensuring consistency and security across replicas
Beyond architectural challenges, a gamut of Hadoop and NoSQL distributions, along with tools to manage and protect individual variations, contribute to data sprawl and mass data fragmentation, proliferating silos and diminishing competitive advantage.
Cohesity addresses mass data fragmentation for IT organizations, and now with the acquisition of Imanis Data, Cohesity gives scale-out modern workloads such as NoSQL the level of protection, recoverability, and manageability previously only available for traditional databases and applications,
helping protect some of your most critical workloads – of any distribution, at any scale.
All Distributions. On a Single Pane of Glass.
Cohesity is the only enterprise-grade backup and recovery solution for all leading Hadoop Distributed File System and NoSQL distributions, tackling mass data fragmentation on every front – on a single data management platform. Cohesity supports the distributed database gamut, including MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchbaseDB, and HBase as well as Hadoop Distributed FS variants including Cloudera, Hortonworks.
Designed with the tenets of distributed and API-driven architecture, Cohesity addresses core data protection challenges. As a result, protecting enterprise-scale deployments that are critical to your business is not an afterthought, confronting the hardest problems in distributed database protection: scalability, dynamism, and consistency.
Scalability as a Foundation
The growth in distributed databases is a testament to the benefit, and backup and recovery dilemma, of distributed databases. Brimming at the petabyte-range, many data volumes require a fundamentally new approach when it comes to data protection.
With Cohesity, a scale-out and distributed architecture is a design principle, not an afterthought. As a result, you can protect massive workloads, effortlessly and efficiently. In contrast to the legacy paradigm of having a single media server, a scale-out data management solution allows you to reap the benefits of parallelized workflows. As always, global variable-length deduplication and compression from Cohesity allow you to tackle even the largest data behemoths.
Cohesity provides numerous, unique benefits in protecting and managing distributed databases, including:
- Application-consistent backups with granular, point-in-time recovery
- Backs up at a logical database level, rather than solely on an individual node level
- Breakthrough space utilization with global variable-length deduplication and compression
Data-Aware: Addressing the Implications of Dynamism
NoSQL and Hadoop databases are by definition, distributed. The nature and scale of these workloads require an agentless deployment; placing an agent on each node is inefficient and impractical.
Cohesity enables agentless and dynamic data protection, providing a modern backup and recovery solution for the most nuanced elements of your infrastructure. An API-driven approach takes modern backup a few steps further: backups are data-aware. Every NoSQL and Hadoop distribution is unique, with subtle but important variations. By using native APIs with individual distributions, Cohesity goes beyond the surface and performs backup and recovery workflows with granularity. As a corollary, backups are aware of file formats and schema, helping maintain replica consistency and providing other advantages:
- Data-aware and semantic dedupe, eliminating the inefficiencies in backing up redundant data that would otherwise appear as unique user data at a node or block level
- Instant search to rapidly find and recover your data
- Agentless deployments that improve infrastructure efficiency
- Incremental restores, query-based restores, and incremental-forever backups
Going Beyond Backup: Consistency, Compliance, and Security
Myths around protecting distributed databases have been propagated, questioning the necessity to protect data that is distributed and replicated – an inherent characteristic of NoSQL and Hadoop workloads. However, this design attribute is pertinent to counteract hardware failures, not data inconsistency or security threats. Distributed database replication is not a protection strategy; in the case of a ransomware attack, data corruption event, or a human error, the threat is propagated throughout the system, not mitigated. It’s simple: replication as a protection strategy is a fallacy.
Cohesity does more than data protection and facilitates enhanced security and consistency for your modern workloads. With Cohesity Imanis Data, there are seamless answers to difficult questions revolving around ransomware defense, maintaining data consistency across replicas, and maximizing space efficiency for distributed database backups. Cohesity Imanis Data enables ransomware defense, providing real-time anomaly detection, along with other benefits that catalyze security and simplicity:
- GUI-driven data masking, RBAC, LDAP authentication and real-time anomaly detection that enhances the security of your workloads and helps you meet compliance requirements
- Simple, automated management for backup, recovery, disaster recovery, test, and dev, and workflow masking capabilities from a single UI
Distributed databases are increasingly edging towards the epicenter of the modern IT organization. They offer greater scalability and flexibility, increasing the pace of application development and operations. Protecting distributed databases is more important than ever and organizations require a new approach that understands the nuances of these modern workloads. Cohesity provides a data protection and management solution that solves challenges in navigating data magnitude and dynamism while facilitating consistency and security across your NoSQL and Hadoop workloads.
Protecting distributed databases doesn’t need to be a challenge. Learn more about how you simplify data protection for NoSQL and Hadoop workloads at https://www.cohesity.com/solutions/backup-and-recovery/nosql-and-hadoop/.
