Hello NetApp. Blue XP recently introduced a new service under Backup and Recovery to protect Ms. SQL server database. We are here to discuss about its overview and how it works. My name is Manohar Kulkarni. I am a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer for database and ONTAP Data Service, and I'm joined by Eben and I will let him introduce. Sure. My name is Eben and I am the product manager for the NetApp backup suite, which focuses on SnapManager, SnapCenter and the Blue XP backup and recovery. So I've been with NetApp for over ten years, providing best practices for managing and protecting databases on NetApp storage systems. Great to have you. So Blue XP Backup and Recovery have already supported for NAS workload. And you can also take a copy of a snapshot and replicate it to a secondary storage or object storage. So can you give some more brief about this new services and how it works for or how we can protect for SQL server database. Sure. So before I get into the Blue XP backup and recovery, I think it's much to know that Blue XP has six core services starting from storage, workload, health, mobility, uh, governance. And last but not the least, protection. So Blue XP backup and recovery is one of the three major pillars of the protection service. So, um, apart from the disaster recovery and the ransomware protection that we provide. So Blue XP backup and recovery has been active since last, uh, two years. Uh, providing backup for NAS or unstructured data. Uh, customers can backup at volume level and perform restores at the individual files or folders level. And at the same time, even you can do it at the entire volume level as well. So this is this was the first, um, I would say the first workload that we offered 3 to 1 backup strategy. So till that time we were predominantly focused on ONTAP to ONTAP. We didn't have a story for protecting, uh, the workloads to an object store for long term retention. So with this Blue XP backup and recovery, we have already started the journey with NAS. Now, uh, this year, early this year, we have pulled in support for Microsoft SQL server. So now you can go ahead and build a 3 to 1 backup strategy for your SQL environments. So again, uh, we both have worked on SnapCenter, which is a manageability product to protect, uh, your database backup securely. And we have introduced a lot of functionality and integration with the ONTAP. So how different do you see between this new service that we have, uh, thatis being offered as compared to NetApp? SnapCenter? I think that's a great question. So SnapCenter is our flagship offering. That's backup offering from NetApp, which has an incredible customer base. Uh, we have many customers, uh, trying out, uh, their workload protection, uh, using SnapCenter. So both in on prem as well as in the cloud. Um, and let me be clear that SnapCenter will be, uh, will be supported going forward. We'll have more and more features coming in the subsequent releases based on the customer feedback. So while Blue XP Backup and Recovery is a SaaS based offering, uh, microservices based architecture, um, you don't have to worry about maintaining, uh, a backup infrastructure. So that's one of the good part. And the second thing is, unlike SnapCenter, you don't have to upgrade, uh, your Windows or Linux VMs as and when new versions are available. You don't have to do patching or securityfixes as and when it is available. All these things areeverything automated for you in the Blue XP. And the last major thing is 3 to 1 backups. So SnapCenter has been focused on doing ONTAP to ONTAP protection. So which means you can take a snapshot on ONTAP primary, you can protect it to ONTAP secondary. Now, if you have a scenario where you want to keep backups for long term retention in an object store, in the cloud or in the on prem like StorageGRID or ONTAP S3, then that's only possible through Blue XP backup and recovery. So you can have a single policy define your entire 3 to 1 backup strategy in Blue XP. So that's one of the. That's a, which means a single control plane to manage your complete database backup from this to storage. Absolutely. This is very good. Even, uh, this is one of the feedback or the comment I received from a lot of customer, even during my last visit into our conference at INSIGHT, customer said that, you know, it's very little painful process. Uh, whenever there is a new updates that release from SnapCenter, they have to go through it approvals to upgrade SnapCenter or be it any services within their infrastructure. So, you know, if a vendor is managing the upgrade thatmakes the things common, simple for the customer to manage their someone else managing their backup services and they can continue to seamlessly backup their infrastructure. Yeah that's true. So I think that's the main interest. And at the same time, uh, with the combination of 3 to 1 backup, you can achieve long term retention. You can meet your compliance needs. So which is not possible with SnapCenter because SnapCenter focuses on ONTAP to ONTAP. Now, when you build a 3 to 1 strategy, you can now protect, uh, your snapshots from ONTAP to an object store. Or you can directly have a fan out architecture ONTAP to ONTAP and ONTAP to an object store. So.we support multiple different backup architecture. And I will be happy to show you in my demo what are the different architectures we support in Blue XP. Yeah, please. I mean, there is no discussion that ends without a demo.is very critical so that you get a glimpse on how it works. So yeah, please do show the demo. Sure. I'm at the Blue XP backup and recovery screen. Um, you can see I've logged into Blue XP and I'm in the canvas page. So I have a couple of my ONTAP boxes being registered, and I have one active, uh, replication between ONTAP to ONTAP. And you can see that I have an Azure blob. I have a AWS bucket. So all these things have been discovered. Now let's go ahead and see what is needed. Uh, from for onboarding to a new unified Blue XP backup and recovery. So you just need to go to protection. I believe you remember the point I was saying, right. So we have like six core services. So you can see storage, uh, monitoring that is storage, health protection, workload governance and mobility. So if you click on protection, uh, you can see the three major, uh, services that is backup and recovery, disaster recovery and ransomware protection. So we'll go into backup and recovery. Click on applications. Now you will see a new banner uh stating the launch of the new service. Uh, let's click start. Now that takes me to a completely new screen. So since I am, uh, I have already done configurations. So that's why you are able to see my SQL environment is already being discovered. So let's go to that and see what all things I did. So I can see I have, uh, um, two hosts being registered. Now, uh, if you go back to the different tabs, you should be able to see the instance name and you can see the databases present in the environment. So um, I have demo DB one and uh, a couple of them, uh, our user DBS and you can see demo DB zero two. So let's go ahead and protect demo DB zero two which is in unprotected state. I'll go ahead here click protect. Now it's pretty simple. It's just a one click protection. You just have to assign a policy. And the policy clearly shows you what kind of architecture you have selected. So you have a 3 to 1 fan out architecture. And the policy is capturing that. You can see the policy information over here. Whatdoes this policy has right. So you can go ahead and click done. So it's done. So you will be your database will be protected. Now for a difference for a case of a first time user. Let's not go with this. I'll create a new policy. Let's say creating a new backup strategy. For the purpose of this demo, I'll just say, hey, uh, um, SQL, uh, prod policy. Okay, I'm having a SQL prod policy. I'm going ahead and selecting a backup architecture. You can switch between different architectures. So this was what I was talking about. Uh you can have different architectures uh, selected. And accordingly you will, you will provide, uh, the details. If you provide disk to disk, you can do protection between ONTAP to ONTAP or if you want to perform disk to object, you don't want another ONTAP in the middle. You can directly do an object storage according to your selection. Thebottom most accordions will keep changing and you just have to provide those settings. Now let me go with thisto object store. And it's pretty simple. You just have to provide your schedule and your retention. Uh, so by default you can see hourly daily schedule. So you can add more schedules, um, however you want based on your strategy. So let me go with the default ones that are appearing that is hourly and daily. I'm going with, uh, snapshots every 15 minutes, hourly snapshots in the case of hourly schedule. Uh, I want to make sure these snapshots stay there for, say, two days. Um, and you can select between days or copies. And if you go to the advanced you can also go ahead and lock your snapshots. So this is the snap lock feature which protects you fromthe ransomware attacks. You can lock your snapshots from getting an accident from being accidentally deleted. So if you provide a day, you can, uh, provide the number of days your snapshots will remain locked. Or if you don't want, I'm just trying to uncheck this. Going with the default, I'm going with the daily snapshots. Uh, probably like I want to do uh, a combination of multiple daily snapshots. Let's do one thing before the business. Ah. I want to take a snapshot. And after the business ah I want to take snapshot, like, say 6 p.m.. That's it. So you have 15 minutes of snapshots, which is taken under hourly and daily snapshots happening at eight and six in the evening. So I'm making sure these snapshots stay there for seven days in my ONTAP. And you can use advanced if you want to lock the snapshot. Now in addition to that you can enable log backup that is capturing your transaction logs. So you can plan effectively how frequently you want to have log backups. So I'm going with the default 15 minutes. So I wanted to get 15 minutes of RPO. And I want to retain that for three days. Now with this setting you need to go to the next level that is your object store. So uh, you have to provide your object store provider. Is it AWS, Azure or StorageGRID? Today we are supporting all three. Now you can choose AWS in this example because that's the that'swhat I wanted to do in this demo. So choose an account, choose a bucket. And then you have to mention what schedules you want to, uh, you want to replicate to the cloud. So I definitely want to have daily, but not hourly.is too frequent. It's it will be too many snapshots in the object store. So I'll go with daily and log backup, provide some retention. How long you want to retain the snapshots for,your daily schedule as well as for your logschedule. Let me go with 30 daily snapshots and log backup, say 30. Now you can also decide to, uh, run this at a some intervals. So ONTAP will create a job like say you want to do it every five minutes so that the job is created and it keeps polling every five minutes. If a snapshot is created within the five minutes, it keeps replicating to the object store. I'll go for something reasonable. Say, uh, every, uh, six hours. Let me see if I have a six hours. Yes, every six hours. So?every six hours it will do the polling. And so that's all about the object store. Now we give an additional leverage for the customers. Now if you want to protect your backups further into an archival store, uh, to,cut down your cost, you can also do that. You can mention after how long you want to, uh, move your backups from the hot tier to a cold tier. That's archive store. So I want to say it's beyond ten days. Make sure it gets tier to a cold storage. And that's it. So with that let's create the policy. It's pretty simple. The policy has been created. Now you should be able to see the policy over here SQL prod policy. Right now you can see the architecture. Well it looks good. Now if you have any other scripts that you want to execute as part of this, you can do that. I don't have anything. Now let's get done. Now you should be able to see your resource protection has happened so you can track the progress over here. Um, and once the, uh, progresses come once the protection job is complete, you should see this database in a protected state. While the protection is in progress. Let me quickly show what all things you can do with the protected one. So here you can see an example of protected scenario protected database. Uh, you can go ahead and check the protection details. And your protection detail should show what is happening in your environment. I can see, uh, the protection health is healthy. And you can see the list of recovery points. That is nothing but the snapshots. And you can see the snapshots, uh, showing up in different location. So,this is all the snapshots that you have. Well that's great. Now let me go back to the SQL workload and show you an example of restore. So if you want to perform a instant backup you can do a backup now. And that helps you to do a test backup. Now if you want to perform a restore, you can also invoke a restore from the database. So this is the coolest part of the service. Now let me give you one more surprise. Now, for a customer who has a large number of SQL environments, you can simply go to the restore tab. And we are giving something like a Google like search where you just have to mention what you want to restore, right? So you just put your first three letters and you should be able to narrow down your restore search, right. You can go ahead and invoke restore from here as well. So.you can continue the restores um fromthere on. So that's all I have for today. So I've been ONTAP also has a feature, FabricPool, where they can tear down their data and snapshot to an economical storage. Why would customer need to have an another services to orchestrate to copy their snapshot to the object storage? Is there a difference? Do you see it? Yeah. So FabricPool or Cloud Tiering is an amazing product. So it focuses on tearing your, Uh, what to say? Your cold data from a premium storage to a capacity storage, a capacity deal. So. But it is not a good solution for backup, because your WAFL metadata is always present in your performance tier, and only the data isgetting moved to a capacity tier. Now, in the event of a disaster, um, even you want to pull back, you can pull back your data, but you are lost with your metadata so that it doesn't make sense, right? And you cannot restore to an alternate storage. And if you want to do that, you need a backup tool. So a backup tool helps you to protect your snapshots to a long term retention, say five, 10 or 15 years. And in the event of a disaster, or if you want to do some kind of a balance sheet, you want to pull early data, do some analytics, you want to pull the data to an alternate location. And at that time you need, uh, the full data present, right. So you need to pull the entire database in a different location. and for that you should definitely use Blue XP backup. And that's a good point. In addition to that, I missed one thing. You can also do clones. So when you do clones, what happens is immediately your data, that is, your cold data that is present in your capacity tier pulls back into the hot tier, your performance tier. Now what happens is that you're not really getting any efficiency, and it's going to degrade your performance as and when you try to do multiple clones on your primary or even from your secondary storage. So which is not a problem in the case of Blue XP because it'sindependent. FabricPool focuses on storage efficiency and backup tool focuses on pure backups. I like clones, and I'm sure DBA has to do frequent copy of their database onto alternate hosts, either for development or for testing purpose. Awesome. We spoke about SQL server, so what else coming in the near future? Uh, so what's cooking in the background? Yeah. So. Uh, yes. It's smoking. Uh, we are doing a lot of things now in the, uh, in the Blue XP backup and recovery. So we are bringing support for VMware and Kubernetes in the immediate. I mean, I would say it's coming soon. So you can expect some news from our side. We'll invite customers to try out our VMware and. Fantastic. Plugin. Uh, well so we have we are planning to bring more and more databases eventually. Um, right now you have SQL and soon you will see VMware and Kubernetes. Awesome. I've already tried out a few use cases with scenarios with Blue XP backup and recovery for database. Yeah. Uh, for new customer, how can they sign up if they have to evaluate this new services? Yes, I think it's pretty simple. You just have to, uh, first make sure you have a Blue XP login. So you need to register into Blue XP and have a login. Um, and add the required members as part of the identity access management. Right. So once that is done, I think you can go ahead and access our service. You can go to protection and access our service directly from there. Now, before doing that, uh, if you need uh, currently it's been in the, in the preview mode, um, you will be expected to, uh, I mean, sign up a form. So I will share the form right below this video in the description. Soyou can sign up, you can provide your details. What is the workload that you are looking for. So we'll reach out to you andwe'll whitelist the service. And so that you can access the service fromyour side. Great. Thank you everyone for coming today. Uh, we just looked at the overview and we plan to do some more deep dive session in the coming days. Yeah. Reach out to us if you have any queries. Uh, the link for the, uh, to sign up will be in the description of this video. Uh, thank you and have a great day. Thank you so much, Manohar.