Home > Storage > PowerFlex > White Papers > Microsoft SQL Server Data Protection using Dell PowerFlex Snapshots > Objective
Protecting mission-critical databases is a top priority for many businesses, with threats such as ransomware, natural disasters, hardware failures, logical or physical data corruptions, and sometimes human error that is hard to recover from. Microsoft SQL Server provides multiple layers of protection, including data checksum validation, synchronous and asynchronous replication, high availability with failover clustering and backup and recovery. While some of these features are used in the examples of this paper, such as failover clustering, the focus of this paper is on demonstrating how PowerFlex snapshots can help with SQL Server database protection and business continuity.
Backing up SQL Server databases is a critical step in maintaining business continuity if the data gets corrupted or lost. Current businesses require a faster backup and restore solution that reduces downtime and simplifies operations. Combining PowerFlex consistent storage snapshot with Microsoft SQL Server T-SQL storage backup mechanism provides a powerful solution for fast backup and recovery.
In addition, with the increased amounts of data that is generated from different sources, Microsoft SQL Server can contain very large databases (VLDBs). Such databases can potentially impact the database performance increasing the time to stream database backups. VLDBs challenge teams that need to adhere to service-level agreements (SLA) for their daily activities along with providing SLAs for regaining business operations after database failure or outage. Snapshot technology reduces the backup time, regardless of the database size, and can restore data in seconds, making the processes of backup and recovery of large databases, including VLDBs faster than streaming backups.
This paper provides an overview and different backup and recovery use cases that integrate PowerFlex storage snapshots and Microsoft SQL Server 2022. It includes the use of the new T-SQL storage snapshot feature facilitating SQL Server database backups without the need for third party software to coordinate the backup between SQL Server and the storage system. It also demonstrates the use and benefits of using snapshots to create database copies and rotating consistent snapshots with the use of PowerFlex snapshot policies.