Boost your Database Operations with Nutanix Database Service 2.4

By: Jeremy Launier

May 2, 2022 | min

I’m excited to announce the release of Nutanix® Database Service (NDB) 2.4, formerly called Nutanix Era. The latest version adds provisioning, database-sharing and disaster-recovery capabilities. But before I dive into the details, it’s important to set some context.

As the product management leader for Nutanix, I have the privilege of working with many customers who use NDB to run and manage their database workloads. They support everything from dev and test environments to production applications.

Explosive data growth coupled with a massive increase in database workloads has prompted significant challenges for these customers:

  • Overtaxed database administration (DBA) and IT teams are saddled with managing more and more databases. Important but tedious tasks like patching and cloning take up valuable DBA and IT admin time and stretch teams thin
  • As the number of databases increase, common tasks like backing up and restoring databases have become incredibly time-consuming. Organizations expect their database backups to be stored as cost-effectively as possible, available across sites, and recover quickly with no data loss
  • The flood of developer requests for things like provisioning databases for dev and test purposes is only growing. These requests consume valuable DBA time and can negatively impact developer productivity if they have to wait hours, days, or even weeks to access a new database.

Since its release, NDB has helped customers modernize their database architectures, simplify database provisioning and administration, and improve DBA and developer productivity.

As a true hybrid multicloud Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), NDB allows customers to choose the best location to run their databases – on-premises, in colocation facilities, and on public clouds – with the same simple user experience across Microsoft® SQL Server, Oracle® Database, PostgreSQL®, MySQL®, and MongoDB® databases.

Following is an overview of NDB capabilities we have introduced over the past year to help our customers manage their growing database fleets.

Automatic failover capabilities and improved database governance In 2021, we added a highly-available DBaaS API and console with automated failover between Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure clusters hosted in different datacenters and regions. This is designed to help ensure that the database and management of the database are protected against site-wide failures, regardless of geography.

We also increased database governance capabilities with additional secure, role-based access controls that enable customers to easily implement security and compliance policies for access to database controls and operations. For example, DBAs can share backups with developers so they can create clones of databases and refresh data in their test environments.

Simplified online storage scaling

Nutanix Database Service manages the most popular database engines, including SQL Server, Oracle, and PostgreSQL, across hybrid multicloud environments. It’s common for our larger customers to generate petabytes of data. Customers can start small and scale database storage online as needed, turning days of planning and testing into a one-click operation.

ServiceNow integration

Using the Nutanix Database Service plugin for database management, customers can now integrate Nutanix with the ServiceNow® platform. This enables Nutanix and ServiceNow customers to use standard workflow processes to significantly ease database provisioning.

Introducing Nutanix Database Service 2.4

With the release of Nutanix Database Service 2.4, we have added a number of features and capabilities to speed up database provisioning at scale and simplify backup and recovery operations.

NDB now lets customers manage hundreds of databases across Nutanix clusters on-premises or in the public cloud via Nutanix® Cloud Clusters (NC2) from a single management console and API.

New snapshot capabilities simplify database recovery from backup data hosted on any Nutanix cluster managed by NDB. This enables customers to tier their backups to storage-optimized Nutanix clusters and use these remotely hosted backups to restore their database or database clusters to a specific point in time.

In addition, NDB customers can now share their backup data with different users and groups. This makes it easy for a developer to access backup data that has been shared with them to create or refresh database clones in their test environments without help from DBA teams.

Finally, Nutanix Database Service 2.4 now empowers DBAs to extend backup policies so that database backups can be placed in any Nutanix cluster in an NDB multi cluster setup. With NDB 2.4, customers can store their backups across multiple Nutanix clusters and when needed, easily recover their database to a point in time, independent of whether the backup data is local to the database server or hosted on the remote Nutanix cluster. DBAs can also share their backup data securely with other people or groups by going to the entity sharing page in NDB, selecting a time machine, choosing the access level and recipient in just a few clicks. Once shared, developers can then login to NDB via the console or API, go to that shared Time Machine and start creating or refreshing clones in their own test environment.

These innovative features and consequential improvements have led customers like SB Technology Corp. and Semlex to rely on Nutanix Database Service for their hybrid multicloud database workloads. Take it on a free test drive today and visit our website to learn more.

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