Every enterprise and Fortune 500 organization is undergoing critical modernization efforts, such as digital transformation, customer experience, and cloud-native deployments. With high application availability as a critical requirement for modern applications (IoT, AI/ML, eCommerce, analytics), many enterprises are turning to distributed NoSQL databases. MongoDB continues to be the database of choice for application teams needing to tackle high-volumes of unstructured data, cloud-native and hybrid cloud deployments, agile application development, and cost-effective scalability.

Although the cloud-readiness of NoSQL databases like MongoDB enables enterprises to power their cloud applications, no database should enter into production until a reliable, enterprise-grade backup and recovery strategy is in place. While native backup tools like mongodump and OpsManger exist, they are often an inadequate solution for enterprise-grade data NoSQL management.

Below are the top 6 Pitfalls of native MongoDB backup and how enterprises can avoid them with Rubrik Datos IO.

1. LEGACY MEDIA SERVER BASED ARCHITECTURES LIMIT SCALABILITY
The native MongoDB backup management solution relies on a legacy media server architecture to process and manage backup and restore operations. These legacy architectures centralize the control of the backup process and move/store the backed-up data through a single server, resulting in siloed performance and scalability.

While using these native tools are convenient, they’re a huge bottleneck when you look to scale your backup performance. Your only option is to add more media servers, which exacerbates the problem and hurts your bottom line.

How Rubrik Datos IO helps you overcome this pitfall:
Rubrik Datos IO supports parallel data streaming without a media server and does not suffer the bottlenecks of media servers. Thus, Rubrik Datos IO can easily scale up to meet performance demands while easily integrating with MongoDB.

2. NATIVE DATABASE DUMP OPTION DOES NOT PROVIDE APPLICATION-CONSISTENT BACKUPS
A manual database dump with homegrown scripting should not be part of an enterprise backup strategy. It doesn’t scale, is problematic for backing up sharded clusters and replica sets, and is subject to human error. Additionally, the granularity of data that can be protected is limited.

How Rubrik Datos IO helps you overcome this pitfall:
Rubrik Datos IO streams data in parallel to secondary backup storage by using lightweight application listeners deployed on each node. So, there’s no need to quiesce the database, delivering consistency for your enterprise’s sharded and unsharded database configurations.

3. NATIVE INCREMENTAL BACKUP IS COMPLEX
To create point-in-time backups, native MongoDB backup management solutions require a full copy of every protected database updated with a stream of oplogs PLUS point-in-time snapshots. This complex workflow makes the backup process slow and necessitates a costly upfront investment in infrastructure.

How Rubrik Datos IO helps you overcome this pitfall:
Rubrik Datos IO supports an incremental-forever approach that significantly reduces RPOs and RTOs. Also, Rubrik Datos IO allows you to deliver incremental-forever backups in native MongoDB format.

4. INCREASED BACKUP STORAGE COSTS
The MongoDB native backup solution uses its own block-based deduplication of full backup snapshots when block storage is utilized. While the upside of this approach is some storage efficiency, block-based deduplication significantly slows down the backup and recovery process as the number of blocks increases. One way organizations are dealing with this is by increasing the block size. However, if the block size is too large, the storage efficiency is compromised, resulting in higher storage costs.

How Rubrik Datos IO helps you overcome this pitfall:
Unlike block-level deduplication, Rubrik Datos IO implements semantic deduplication, which allows the reduction of multiple replicas into a single golden copy. Rubrik Datos IO customers are finding semantic deduplication reduces backup storage requirements by 70% or more.

5. LIMITED CAPABILITY TO RESTORE TO TEST/DEV CLUSTERS
Delivering data mobility to refresh or push data into test/dev often requires restoring data to a cluster with a different topology from the source cluster. Unfortunately, native MongoDB backup solutions must restore data to the original topology (shards/replica sets), making it difficult to create smaller test/dev clusters.

How Rubrik Datos IO helps you overcome this pitfall:
Rubrik Datos IO supports multiple features that can help your enterprise quickly accelerate building test/dev databases. These features include topology-free restore and any-to-any recovery across sharded and unsharded clusters.

6. NO SUPPORT FOR NON-MONGODB DATABASE ENVIRONMENTS
When it comes to enterprise data protection, organizations expect a single application and management console for protecting a variety of NoSQL databases, filesystems, and enterprise data sources. Native MongoDB backup solutions are not extensible for any data sources other than MongoDB, resulting in more silos, operational overhead, and point-based backup solutions–all of which add cost, complexity, and risk to your backup strategy.

How Rubrik Datos IO helps you overcome this pitfall:
Rubrik Datos IO delivers multi-platform, enterprise-grade data protection. In addition to supporting MongoDB, Rubrik Datos IO supports multiple next-generation databases such as Apache Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise. Additionally, Rubrik Datos IO supports databases deployed on-premises or in Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, or Oracle Cloud.

The rapid proliferation of modern applications built on NoSQL databases has created a critical data protection gap that can expose many organizations to data loss, ransomware attacks, and undesirable compliance challenges. Built from the ground up for next-gen apps, Rubrik Datos IO caters to the needs of application owners and DevOps teams and takes away the operational hassles of deploying and managing protection infrastructure. Most importantly, it is a reliable and scalable solution to use even in scenarios of node failures and minimizes recovery time for optimal performance.

Learn more about Rubrik Datos IO and how it can help enterprises decrease AWS S3 costs by up to 90%, reduce recovery time by upwards of 30% and achieve a 300% ROI in its first 12 months of deployment.