Solution Overview Protect and Repurpose Microsoft SQL Server Databases with Dell EMC PowerStore Enable your Microsoft SQL Server DBAs and application owners to manage their own protection and re-purposing of Microsoft SQL Server database copies and their applications. Simplify, orchestrate, and automate the process of generating, consuming and expiring writable copies for use in test/dev, sandbox, patch testing, reporting, and beyond. A Modern Storage Appliance Designed for the Data Decade Navigating the Data Era with Dell Technologies With 98 of the Fortune 100 running Microsoft SQL Server, it is not only the PowerStore provides our most widely deployed database management system in the worldwide market customers with data-centric, today but also used in some of the world's most mission critical environments. intelligent, and adaptable Today, data is more strategic to businesses of all sizes, and effective storage infrastructure that supports both strategies are critical to creating competitive advantage. According to ESG’s traditional and modern workloads 2019 Data Storage Trends Survey, 63% expect to develop and offer new data- centric products and/or services in the next 24 months. As we enter the data era, the combination of massive amounts of data and technology innovation provides the opportunity for businesses to transform into disruptive, digital powerhouses. In the data era, companies are struggling with more data to manage than ever, driving both opportunity and complexity for our customers. As businesses rush to transform and capitalize on this opportunity, they realize that there are two major forces putting pressure on their IT infrastructure, which is hindering their overall digital transformation efforts: Data – more data types exist (Block, File, Object, Containers, etc.) than ever before and the requirements to support data vary widely. Data is also no longer 6X more IOPS & 3X lower latency confined to data centers. It is created, processed, and stored everywhere, based on internal testing vs. Unity including at the Edge and in the cloud. XT Operations – IT organizations are now expected to operate with the same Scale-up to 1PB raw per system agility and economics as public cloud. They must continuously evolve to & scale-out to 8 active-active address the ever-expanding demands of both their data and their business. nodes 4:1 guaranteed inline data reduction without compromising performance Intelligent snapshot capabilities allow for the simple protection and repurposing of Microsoft SQL Server databases Dell EMC AppSync allows PowerStore to create application aware snapshots through the use Dell EMC PowerStore provides our customers with data-centric, intelligent, and of VSS (Volume Shadow Service) adaptable infrastructure that supports both traditional and modern workloads. In this solution overview we will explore all the benefits of PowerStore and the integrated copy data management capabilities available that allow for the protection (locally and remote), and re-purposing of Microsoft SQL Server databases and the applications running on them. Protect & Repurpose Microsoft SQL Server Databases with Dell EMC PowerStore © 2020 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. Consolidated Microsoft Data Estate PowerStore’s single architecture for block, file, and vVols utilizes the latest technologies to achieve disparate objectives without sacrificing the cost-effective nature of midrange storage. The ability to provide storage in multiple formats to applications, ranging from physical and virtual volumes to containers to traditional files, provides the ultimate workload flexibility and enables IT to simplify and consolidate infrastructure. Comprehensive integration with open management frameworks, containerization platforms, DevOps platforms and virtualization enable PowerStore to seamlessly support the demands of Microsoft SQL Server. PowerStore is designed from the ground up to utilize the latest in storage and interface technologies in order to maximize application performance and eliminate bottlenecks. Each PowerStore appliance has two active-active nodes and uses NVMe to take full advantage of the tremendous speed and low latency of this next generation media, with greater device bandwidth and queue depth. PowerStore has been architected to maximize performance with NVMe flash storage and supports the even greater demands of Intel Optane Storage Class Memory (SCM) which provides performance approaching the speed of DRAM. This performance-centric design enables PowerStore to deliver 6x more IOPs and 3x lower latency for real-world workloads compared to previous generations of Dell midrange storage. Protecting Microsoft SQL Server Databases Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and beyond includes native capabilities for creating sync and async replicas via AlwaysOn Availability Groups. Availability replicas provide high availability, scale out readable copies, disaster recovery and migration and upgrade capabilities. The SQL Server availability features do not replace the requirement to have a robust, well tested backup and restore strategy, the most fundamental building block of any availability solution1. While many methods of data protection exist, one of the simplest and most-effective methods involves using snapshots. Snapshots allow recovery of data by rolling back to an older point-in-time or copying select data from the snapshot. Snapshots continue to be an essential data-protection mechanism that is used across a wide variety of industries and use cases. Snapshots can preserve the most important mission-critical production data, sometimes integrating with other data protection technologies. For versions of Microsoft SQL Server running on Microsoft Windows Server, Dell EMC AppSync can leverage the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to take an application consistent snapshot of the databases. This method of snapshot mimics the process of a full backup and can be used as such. Automating & Orchestrating Protection Integrated copy data management (iCDM) strategy is important to the overall return on investment for any storage solution. Dell EMC PowerStore's data services provide the foundation for the ability to protect the production Microsoft SQL Server workloads while also easily re- purposing the database copies. iCDM allows the DBA and Application owners peace of mind with policy driven protection and ad-hoc copies as needed without needing to involve or wait for the storage admin. Service plans within Dell EMC AppSync, our Integrated Copy Data Management (iCDM) software, provide a copy management workflow for protecting applications and are able to make copies locally, remotely, or both. In addition, repurposing workflows provide multi-generational copy processes. Administrators can also deploy a hypervisor directly on the PowerStore appliance, using the same VMware tools and methods they use with external hosts. This game-changing capability, known as AppsON, is ideal for data-intensive workloads and for hosting AppSync in a VM. 1 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/sql-server-business-continuity-dr?view=sql-server-ver15 Copies on demand Integrated Copy Data Management enables rich application workflows making a development copy, instantly refreshing it to the latest prod data, pushing the dev copy to QA, pushing the QA copy to a scalability test bed, and rolling the output back into prod. For analytics processes, production data can be extracted and pushed to all downstream analytics applications on- demand. For operations, copies from production can be made when needed to pre-production testing, run simulations or test the latest patches. iCDM operations do not affect other copies or risk their SLAs. Test/Dev Self Service Copies Production Microsoft SQL Server databases can be scheduled to have a gold master development database copy refreshed on a regular basis. The gold master copy then can be cleansed of all sensitive data and made available to the test/dev engineers. Since the gold master is regularly refreshed from production, the space efficiency of the snapshot remains fairly constant. Microsoft SQL Server developers can then use PowerShell commands to refresh their copy of a database with the current gold master copy. Regularly refreshing the copy helps with data reduction by limiting the deltas between the copy and production and are as simple as dismounting the database, refreshing and remounting the database which takes as little as 5 seconds to complete. This is a much greater level of availability and agility than traditional models separate production and test/dev. For customers with larger environments, geographically separated test/dev requirements, or just simply looking to isolate production workloads, iCDM accommodates the ability to replicate copies of the databases that can be used for protection purposes or simply for the establishment of a gold master copy on a second array. The management for this is simple to configure via Protection Policies to ensure that the entire application is replicated and available. Application Patching and Upgrade Workflows Dell EMC iCDM makes the process of patch testing, or application upgrade testing, simple, space efficient, and fast. Since Dell EMC AppSync discovers and maps storage Microsoft SQL based applications the workflow for patch or software upgrades is as follow: The workflow allows for ad-hoc copy creation for sandbox testing and validation prior to execution in production. Since all data services of the array are available to