Enterprises today are facing challenges to maintain database workloads that are spread across multiple data centers and cloud providers. Application users expect low response times, while also requiring applications to be highly available and consistent. Simultaneously Enterprises are asked to reduce costs, while provisioning database infrastructure to meet increasing demands.
YugabyteDB is a distributed database that provides answers to these challenges and more. YugabyteDB is an open-source database built for transactional applications that runs on-premises or in the cloud. It uses RocksDB key-value store as a per-node storage engine and offers a flexible, multi-API interface layer that includes a powerful runtime compatible PostgreSQL API (the YSQL API) and a flexible Cassandra-inspired API (the YCQL API). YugabyteDB uses automatic sharding and internal replications to achieve high performance and horizontal scaling while maintaining high availability and resiliency. To achieve its high performance while maintaining full ACID compliance, it uses the Raft protocol for distributed databases.
PowerFlex is a software-defined storage platform that is designed to reduce operational and infrastructure complexity, empowering organizations to move faster by delivering flexibility, elasticity, and simplicity with predictable performance and resiliency at scale. The PowerFlex family provides a foundation that combines compute and high-performance storage resources in a managed, unified fabric. PowerFlex also delivers stable and predictable performance for all workloads including high-performance databases.
Organizations implement backup and recovery strategies to protect data against a wide range of issues like hardware or software failures, user errors, data corruptions, cloud outages, natural disasters, and more that can put the data at risk. In modern, distributed SQL databases like YugabyteDB, some of these issues are addressed natively by the distributed architecture. However, there are still scenarios where data backup and recovery is required. Leveraging PowerFlex native snapshots, in coordination with the YugabyteDB snapshot feature, users can create or restore database backup copies in seconds, regardless of the size of the database. Additionally, leveraging PowerFlex native snapshot consistency, users can create ad-hoc or policy-based consistent database copies that can be used for test, development, reporting, data analysis, or similar purposes.
This paper provides guidance for the deployment of virtualized YugabyteDB on-prem using Dell PowerFlex as the underlying software-defined storage. This paper also describes the performance best practices for a YugabyteDB database that is deployed on a PowerFlex system. Additionally, this paper demonstrates the utilization of Dell PowerFlex native snapshot capabilities for streamlined database backup and recovery processes.