[NTNX] – ERA, DBaaS for the Enterprise Cloud – part 1

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Let’s start 2019 with a DBaas story 🙂

First of all, we need to understand how Databases operations are complex today and why :

Most of IT companies are using different DBs engines such as SQL, Oracle, Postgres etc..

  • Different sizes, growth, SLA, etc..
  • IT needs to manage a lot of duplicate. For one production dabatase you will have a set of Dev/Acceptance copies.
  • IT/DB admins needs to handle complex operations such as, provisioning, life cycle management, monitoring, security, etc…

If we just look at the provisioning operation:

This workflow represent a traditional DB Provisioning process and we can see where the business is struggling. It takes hours, days even more to provision a Database and the process will involve several teams and at the end potential errors…

 

So what Nutanix Era offers ?

 

Nutanix Era allows DB admins to define standards for their database provisioning needs and provide end-state driven provisioning functionality that includes mission-critical cluster, HA database deployments. Era provisioning service includes:

 

  • Custom software images tailor-made to enterprise needs (PSUs and one-off patches)
  • Pre/post create DB scripts insertion
  • Complex HA environments support (e.g. Oracle RAC)
  • Sophisticated SLAs (continuous, daily, and monthly RPO)
  • Predefined/Customizable SLAs based on business requirements

 

COPY DATA  

Just like how easy it is to perform copy/paste operations on your computer, and these operations should be that simple for databases that are terabytes in size. For enterprise databases, for instance, the requirement is not just to copy/ paste of a particular instance but the ability to create clones from any point-in-time. Nutanix Era time machine technology powers the one-click database copy and paste operations from any point in time while maintaining QOS for specific SLAs. Era lifecycle management service includes:

 

Space efficient incremental snapshots representing full synthetic backups

  • Zero-byte database clones to any point-in-time
  • Pre-post masking script insertion
  • Fast clone creation (few minutes)
  • Production-like QOS for clones
  • Database server only clones
  • One-click refresh in few minutes
  • Support for brownfield databases
  • Consumer grade restoring experience

 

 

Now it is time for a quick overview and demo :

 

First the home dashboard will provide you a full overview of your databases. How many clones you have, the size of your DB, current state of your DBs , alerts etc..

 

If you want to create a database, first, select the engine that you want to provision (GA, only Oracle and PostgreSQL Is supported).

 

For example I will configure an oracle RAC with 3 nodes. Why 3 ?  because it is just simple as selecting 2 🙂

Then you have to specify the Cluster Name , the binaries that you will use, the network on which the VMs will be deployed and your SSH Public key (Used for node access).

In the Database tab, you need to set the “Database name”, “SID”, “Sys password” and your Database parameter profile. If needed, you can also call a script to perform some customer operation. Can be useful when you clone a Production DB to a Dev DB and want to clean up some Data.

Here, you will have to setup your Time Machine policy. Which SLA do you want? For example, you can select Gold and have a continuous recover possible for 30 days, then daily for the next 30 days, weekly for 4 weeks etc…

You can also specify the number of snapshots per day that you want and specify the log catch up (15 minutes minimum at GA) and all of this without any performance impact for your DB.

Just click on “Provision” and you are ready to go !

You will be able to follow the provisioning of your database.  And yes, it tooks 12 min to provisioning a 3 nodes RAC Cluster and configure the Time machine capability !!!

Oh one last thing!  You can do this also using API Calls.

Era rocks !!!!  right ? 🙂

 

In the next part, I will cover more in details Time Machine and Copy Data Management.

For more informations about Era : Here

 

 

 

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