Enterprise-level backup solutions for MySQL

Saturday, 19 August 2023 08:44

Enterprise-level backup solutions for MySQL

Caspar Camille Rubin on Unsplash

GUEST OPINION: Information is undoubtedly one of the most important resources a business can have. As such, business data protection should always be a priority – since there are plenty of different ways for sensitive data to be either damaged or compromised. 

Now that we know data must be protected – the next question is, “How?”. Luckily, there are plenty of different methods and approaches to data security, each with its own list of benefits, shortcomings, and unique factors in place. Implementing some sort of data security system with complex rules in place may be quite difficult for less knowledgeable people. Creating a copy of the system’s data (backup) is not – and it is often considered one of the easiest data protection measures.

Of course, a backup operation in its basic form would only be suitable in simple situations – to safeguard personal data or the data of a small business. Medium-sized companies and large enterprises would need more complex and feature-rich solutions – which are often referred to as enterprise backup solutions.

Enterprise-level backup solutions are usually packed with all kinds of features and can support a plethora of different target storage types – disks, tapes, cloud storage, virtual machines, databases, containers, and even SaaS application data.

Most enterprise-level backup solutions have two large goals they strive to work towards – offering a variety of integrations with different platforms and storage types, as well as streamlining and/or simplifying the process of performing backup/restore tasks. Of course, both of these goals (as well as the overarching goal of protecting the client’s information) are rather vague and not particularly descriptive.

As such, here are several different characteristics that a good large-scale backup solution should have when working with large enterprises:

• Being able to scale the backup/data protection solution both ways – scalability itself is not that unusual, but there are plenty of cases when an enterprise backup solution becomes exponentially expensive the more it works with large data volumes
• Supporting integrations with other enterprise-grade systems, and not just different data storage types – a competent backup solution should be able to interact with other IT systems that are already in place

• Being able to offer bare metal recovery for workstations on Windows and/or Linux operating systems – such measures are necessary for proper disaster recovery strategies and not all of the existing solutions can perform bare metal recovery in the first place

• Having centralized data management capabilities –  with the option to oversee different backup and recovery operations in one place, greatly improving the convenience of performing backup and recovery tasks

This list of features is far from conclusive, there are dozens of other features and functions that may be necessary for a specific company in a specific situation – and there is no backup solution that can perform literally every single task possible in this industry. The potential feature range also makes it rather difficult to research this particular topic, even for people that are knowledgeable in this particular area.

However, there is a solution to this particular problem – Requests for Proposal (RFP). RFPs are rarely used outside of some of the biggest enterprise companies on the market, since it is quite far away from the traditional backup solution research method. The biggest difference here is the fact that RFPs represent a feature set that the company wants to have in a backup and recovery solution – and the company in question is the one presenting its features to the customer (not the other way around).

Of course, RFP as a process is much more complex than that, and there are plenty of industry-specific features that are discussed before the final choice is made in regard to a backup solution. For example, the MySQL automatic backup as a feature may be relatively common for enterprise backup solutions – but most of these solutions can only offer the basic MySQL integration with the bare minimum of features to work with – treating a snapshot of MySQL database as a regular physical backup with no discernable features to work with.

In these kinds of scenarios, everything comes down to a choice between accepting the solution’s basic capabilities in a specific area, looking for a solution that is more versatile and feature-rich in that same area, or choosing a dedicated small-scale backup solution that only works with a specific storage type (such as MySQL) but can deliver far more features than most of its enterprise-level counterparts.

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