Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Database play a critical role in almost every IT environment. That’s why from the beginning, Rubrik has focused on delivering a single platform that converges data protection and data security to ensure you can rapidly and reliably recover when disaster strikes.

Our initial release automated the backup of databases with a single SLA policy engine that enabled customers to automatically protect their Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases as they were created. We also introduced Rubrik Live Mount to provide self-service database clones without the need for any added storage.

To keep your data safe, this same platform also encrypts and logically air gaps all of your data from the rest of the environment. In addition, all access can be governed by comprehensive authentication and access controls such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), role-based access control (RBAC), retention locks, and time-based one-time passwords (TOTP).

Together, all of these capabilities have allowed your teams to offload the management of your database backups, get more out of your backup data, and help to ensure you have a reliable backup you can count on when you need it most.

Since then, Rubrik has delivered a relentless pace of innovation, focusing on continuously raising the bar on performance, usability, and scale. Afterall, database environments are only growing. The only way you can effectively protect them is by having a solution that prioritizes security and focuses on giving you the ability to quickly and efficiently backup and recover data with ease.
 

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Earlier this year, Microsoft SQL saw a 4x scale improvement for environments with many databases per host, which allowed you to backup 10,000 databases per host overnight. Rubrik also introduced the ability to backup 2.5x more log backups on a single Rubrik Appliance. This performance was up from 2,000 to 5,000 log backups per hour per appliance. Additionally, customers have the flexibility to unlock these performance features both at the cluster or host level. Lastly, you were able to leverage change block tracking (CBT) for Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) to drive faster incremental backups as well as add support for availability groups (AG) and log shipping.
 

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As for Oracle, we were pleased to announce support for Oracle Data Guard and additional advanced cloning options to further simplify advanced recoveries to dissimilar environments. Oracle Data Guard support lets you offload your primary backups to standby databases, leveraging centralized management and failover or switchover awareness to ensure your backups run as intended. Additionally, our enhanced Advanced Recovery Options allow you to enter recovery details directly into the Rubrik UI as part of a recovery operation. More importantly, Rubrik validates the data you provide to ensure the target can support the parameters and allows you to call your custom pre or post restore scripts, making Rubrik your one-stop shop for recoveries.

Rubrik’s core focus is on delivering powerful policy-based protection for protecting mission-critical databases. We want you to have peace of mind knowing that your data is secure and readily available when disaster strikes.

With that said, we are incredibly excited to announce our upcoming enhancements to Rubrik for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server as part of our winter release that will raise the bar yet again. 

Here are the enhancements you will want to keep an eye out for:

Performance

Even Faster Microsoft SQL & Oracle Recovery Performance

Rubrik pioneered instant recovery and has continually focused on reducing recovery windows. Rapid recovery is a must for today’s businesses, and this release brings even faster recovery for critical databases from ransomware, natural disasters, and operational failures. For Oracle and SQL customers looking to quickly recover large databases with a large number of files, recovery times have greatly improved performance at scale. SQL customers will see up to 3x improvement in restores, i.e. a 1TB database in ~17 mins or a 9TB database in ~3 hours, allowing them to minimize downtime and ensure data is always readily available. Oracle customers will see up to 25% improvement for database recoveries, i.e. a 10TB database can be restored back to the host in ~4 hours.

Usability

Added Support for Oracle Flex ASM

For large Oracle Database Real Application Cluster (RAC) environments, Oracle introduced Flex ASM as an option to simplify the management of large RAC clusters. The goal was to provide high availability for RAC databases if the ASM instance went down on a particular cluster node. With our upcoming release, Rubrik will automatically discover RAC nodes as part of a FLEX ASM environment and keep them protected through inherited SLAs–a great way to get your time back and give your team peace of mind knowing your RAC environment leveraging FLEX ASM is automatically protected.

Automated Log Deletion for Oracle Data Guard

As mentioned, initial Rubrik support for Oracle Data Guard was launched as part of our summer release earlier this year. Today, you can only support host log retention and log deletion on the node where the backups are running. This focus puts the ownership on the DBA to manage archive log deletion on the other member nodes that are part of the Data Guard configuration. Our upcoming release will allow you to backup from the primary and delete logs on standby nodes, backup from standby, and delete logs on primary or standby nodes. This control will provide DBAs with the automation to delete logs from all member nodes without any manual intervention.

Oracle Database State Refresh

Speed and recovery go hand and hand. Often the faster you can recover, the better. Our upcoming release introduces the ability for you to refresh the state of a specific database on-demand. When a database goes offline or drops, it can often take longer than desired, especially in dense database environments. This release will allow you to use the “Refresh” button on the database overview page to kick off an on-demand state refresh, and Rubrik will prioritize this ahead of other regularly scheduled tasks to give you an updated state. Just another way to help save you time when executing essential tasks like same host recoveries.

Scale

Auto-scaling of Oracle RAC Backups

In dense database environments with many databases per RAC node, backups could take a long time to run, and concurrency could be an issue. With this release, Rubrik will provide a setting that will automatically distribute the backups within a RAC cluster and dynamically adapt backups to each environment, i.e., dense or sparse. Furthermore, this setting will take precedence over cluster-level node priority. Thus, it will enable you to achieve better performance and efficiency across your RAC cluster by using the computing power of all RAC nodes.

We are very excited to bring you this continued innovation to help you manage some of your most mission-critical systems. Rubrik for Databases is about helping you give your teams their time back, operationalizing your backup data, and turbocharging your recovery. You can expect continued innovation to enhance the security, performance, usability, and scale, so your data is rapidly available when you need it most.

For more detailed information on these new capabilities, please take a look at the Core Workloads: Expanded Coverage and Faster Recoveries breakout session as part of our winter announcement. You can also find additional information on Rubrik for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server by visiting the Rubrik website.