How Enterprises Are Rethinking Data Protection for Databases with Nutanix Database Service

Access to data is critical and a significant portion of it resides in enterprise databases like SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, and MariaDB.

For many enterprises – especially in regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, and the public sector – protecting database workloads is not only a best practice but a compliance mandate as well.

Business continuity requirements often demand that databases be restored within strict timeframes. This makes fast, intelligent and efficient data protection a must-have.

As IT environments become more complex, native tools — while useful — may not always meet today’s needs for speed, compliance, and recovery. That’s why many organizations are choosing Nutanix Database Service (NDB) — a modern platform that makes it easier to run and protect databases across both on-premises and cloud environments

The Problem with Native Database Backups

Organizations today rely on native utilities to back up and restore their databases, but as environments scale, these tools can face challenges in meeting enterprise demands for speed, consistency, and compliance. Forrester highlights that rapid data growth and increasing complexity often outpace traditional backup strategies, especially when managing large datasets across hybrid environments.¹ Real-world accounts also point to long backup windows, performance slowdowns, and operational risks when using native tools for multi-terabyte databases.² Additionally, industry analysis notes that native methods for some databases lack features like incremental backups, application consistency, and scalability, which are critical for enterprise use.³

Unfortunately, native tools can often fall short of meeting modern enterprise data protection requirements. The limitations manifest across several critical dimensions:

Long backup and restore windows

A full backup of a 40 TB database using native tools can sometimes take many hours—or even longer—depending on several variables. While backup performance is influenced by many factors, some native tools may take longer for large databases due to the volume of data being read and written, consistency requirements, use of compression or encryption, and varying levels of parallelism or I/O throughput. Backup strategy also plays a role—full backups are typically more time-consuming than incremental or differential backups that capture only changes.

Restore times can also vary. Restoring from a full backup generally involves writing large datasets back to disk, rebuilding indexes and metadata structures, and applying transaction logs to ensure consistency. In environments with strict SLAs or high availability requirements, this can result in longer recovery times—especially when using tools or approaches that don’t optimize for speed or automation. 

Infrastructure strain

Native backup processes can consume significant compute, I/O and network bandwidth. These operations can often impact workloads, and moving backup data to remote locations further burdens the network by affecting overall system performance.

Skyrocketing storage costs

Each backup and database clone that uses native tools is typically a full physical copy unless additional scripting or tooling is introduced. The cumulative storage footprint can grow rapidly as daily jobs run across development, testing and production environments.

SLA and compliance gaps

Since native backups typically are full copies of the data, they often take hours – or even days – making it tough to meet the recovery time objective(RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) targets promised to application teams.

This can lead to missed SLAs and puts organizations at regulatory risk. Regulatory mandates like GDPR, HIPAA, SOX require timely and auditable recovery capabilities.

Operational complexity and fragmented management

Native database backup tools typically require significant manual effort – from writing scripts and scheduling jobs to managing retention rules and recovery workflows. Each database engine has its own tooling, format and processes, requiring  teams to manage backups in silos. This fragmented approach makes it difficult to enforce consistent policies, standardize operations or automate recovery.

Native tools also typically lack centralized monitoring, real-time alerts and enterprise-wide visibility. Troubleshooting failures and verifying backup health can involve manual checks and isolated logs, which may increase the risk of configuration drift and operational errors at scale.

Scalability challenges in hybrid and multicloud environments

Native tools are not always designed for enterprise-scale automation or to manage thousands of databases distributed across hybrid or multicloud environments. As database estates grow, so does the potential for operational bottlenecks, resource constraints and delayed recovery operations.

Data Protection with Nutanix Database Service

Nutanix Database Service (NDB) is a next-generation platform that delivers database-as-a-service (DBaaS) and manages the entire database lifecycle across on-premises and hybrid clouds. A crucial capability of NDB is the Time Machine feature, a built-in data protection engine designed to solve today’s database challenges, with performance and capabilities that native tools cannot match..

How NDB Improves How you Manage and Operate Databases

Application-consistent snapshots in seconds

To deliver backups are application-consistent, NDB integrates with native database mechanisms specific to each engine to quiesce the database prior to a snapshotting operation:

• SQL Server – via Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)
• Oracle – using ALTER DATABASE BEGIN/END BACKUP
• PostgreSQL – with pg_backup_start() / pg_backup_stop()
• MongoDB – via Ops Manager
• MySQL / MariaDB – with FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK (where applicable)

Once the database is quiesced, NDB leverages the Nutanix Acropolis Operating System (AOS) native volume snapshot technology to capture the actual backup at the storage layer.

Nutanix AOS uses metadata-based, redirect-on-write snapshots that mark volume blocks linked to the database as read-only. Once the snapshot is captured, it creates a new volume for all writes made after the snapshot.

This enables fast, space-efficient backups and restores with minimal impact on performance – without the need for external agents or slow logical dumps. Check out the AoS eBook to learn more.

The NDB Time Machine goes beyond just snapshots. It also captures and manages database transaction logs to enable true point-in-time recovery (PITR). This includes:

• SQL Server – T-SQL transaction logs
• Oracle – Archive  logs
• PostgreSQL – Write-Ahead Logs (WAL)
• MongoDB – Oplog (operations log)
• MySQL /MariaDB – binary logs (binlogs)

By combining application-consistent snapshots with continuous log backups, NDB allows you to rewind your database to a precise moment in time – whether it's just before an accidental drop-table command, data corruption or a failed deployment. This granularity provides greater resilience and control compared to native backup methods.

Thin cloning for dev/test in minutes

With NDB, cloning doesn’t mean duplicating terabytes of data. Instead, it uses the NDB Time Machine to create thin clones through AOS snapshots. These clones reference existing data blocks from the source volume and only consume additional storage for new writes or updates.

This typically results in lower storage usage compared to full copies, especially in environments with low change rates between clones and their sources. As no full data copy is required, provisioning development, test and analytics environments takes just a few minutes, even for multiterabyte databases. Clone refreshes are similarly fast because only incremental changes are applied.

Hybrid- and multicloud-ready

Snapshots can be seamlessly moved across Nutanix clusters – whether on-premises using the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) solution or in the public cloud using the Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) platform on AWS or Azure. This capability unlocks several key benefits:

• Disaster recovery across regions, with access to snapshots and transaction logs for full recovery.
• Efficient long-term retention archival without consuming primary storage.
• Cross-environment workflows allow snapshots from production to be used for cloning databases in dev/test environments to improve agility and data reuse.

Why Enterprises are Making the Switch

With NDB Time Machine, organizations worldwide are:

• Reducing RTO/RPO from hours to minutes.
• Cutting backup windows from days to minutes.
• Saving up on storage costs.
• Enabling cross-cloud mobility of snapshots and log backups.

Where can I test this capability?

Getting started with NDB is easy.  Simply sign-up for a free test drive online to experience how easy it is to provision, take snapshots and restore your databases within minutes. No software to download or install.

Final Thoughts

The world is changing and so should your approach to database protection. Enterprises require more than what native backup tools currently offer. Nutanix enables enterprises to embrace snapshot-based, log-aware and cloud-integrated solutions that deliver the speed, flexibility and simplicity enterprises demand.

With Nutanix Database Service and NDB Time Machine, data protection is no longer a bottleneck – it’s a strategic enabler.

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