Database As A Service

Database-
as-a-Service
Nutanix Special Edition
by Scott D. Lowe
These materials are © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Database-as-a-Service For Dummies®, Nutanix Special Edition
Published by
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
111 River St.
Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774
www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections
107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the Publisher. Requests to
the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River
Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Trademarks: Wiley, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, Dummies.com, and related trade dress are trademarks
or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries,
and may not be used without written permission. Nutanix and the Nutanix logo are trademarks or registered
trademarks of Nutanix. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., is
not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
LIMIT OF LIABILITY/DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY: THE PUBLISHER AND THE AUTHOR MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS
OR WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS WORK
AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION WARRANTIES OF FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. NO WARRANTY MAY BE CREATED OR EXTENDED BY SALES OR PROMOTIONAL
MATERIALS. THE ADVICE AND STRATEGIES CONTAINED HEREIN MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR EVERY SITUATION. THIS
WORK IS SOLD WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT THE PUBLISHER IS NOT ENGAGED IN RENDERING LEGAL,
ACCOUNTING, OR OTHER PROFESSIONAL SERVICES. IF PROFESSIONAL ASSISTANCE IS REQUIRED, THE SERVICES OF
A COMPETENT PROFESSIONAL PERSON SHOULD BE SOUGHT. NEITHER THE PUBLISHER NOR THE AUTHOR SHALL
BE LIABLE FOR DAMAGES ARISING HEREFROM. THE FACT THAT AN ORGANIZATION OR WEBSITE IS REFERRED TO
IN THIS WORK AS A CITATION AND/OR A POTENTIAL SOURCE OF FURTHER INFORMATION DOES NOT MEAN THAT
THE AUTHOR OR THE PUBLISHER ENDORSES THE INFORMATION THE ORGANIZATION OR WEBSITE MAY PROVIDE
OR RECOMMENDATIONS IT MAY MAKE. FURTHER, READERS SHOULD BE AWARE THAT INTERNET WEBSITES
LISTED IN THIS WORK MAY HAVE CHANGED OR DISAPPEARED BETWEEN WHEN THIS WORK WAS WRITTEN AND
WHEN IT IS READ.
For general information on our other products and services, or how to create a custom For Dummies book for your
business or organization, please contact our Business Development Department in the U.S. at 877-409-4177,
contact info@dummies.biz, or visit www.wiley.com/go/custompub. For information about licensing the For
Dummies brand for products or services, contact BrandedRights&Licenses@Wiley.com.
ISBN 978-1-119-70614-4 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-70615-1 (ebk)
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Publisher’s Acknowledgments
We’re proud of this book and of the people who worked on it. For details on how
to create a custom For Dummies book for your business or organization, contact
info@dummies.biz or visit www.wiley.com/go/custompub. For details on licensing
the For Dummies brand for products or services, contact BrandedRights&Licenses@
Wiley.com.
Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:
Project Manager: Martin V. Minner Business Development
Senior Managing Editor: Representative: Karen Hattan
Rev Mengle Production Editor: Siddique Shaik
Associate Publisher: Katie Mohr
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................ 1
About This Book.................................................................................... 1
Foolish Assumptions............................................................................. 1
Icons Used in This Book........................................................................ 2
Beyond the Book................................................................................... 2
CHAPTER 1: Exploring Databases and Their Evolution................. 3

Profiting and Propheting: Reshaping the Bottom Line..................... 4
Discovering key business benefits behind databases................. 4
Turning to databases to extract business value.......................... 5
Analyzing the Evolution of the Database Landscape........................ 5
Rediscovering the original RDBMS................................................ 5
Evaluating the splintering of database architectures.................. 6
Identifying key uses cases for non-relational databases............ 8
Closing the door: Why open source is becoming more
closed................................................................................................ 8
Identifying Legacy Database Challenges............................................ 9
Why legacy databases aren’t ready for modern needs............... 9
Converging analytical and transactional databases.................. 12
CHAPTER 2: Understanding Trends Shaping the

Database Industry..................................................................... 13
Understanding the Role of the Cloud with Modern Databases.... 13
Understanding the Growth of Data.................................................. 14
Pinpointing the sources of data sprawl...................................... 15
Understanding the reasons behind database sprawl............... 15
Identifying the impact of data and database sprawl................. 16
Reigning in database copies......................................................... 16
Reshaping the Industry with Database-as-a-Service...................... 17
Seeing How Containers and Microservices Affect Data.................. 18
Discovering Hyperconverged Infrastructure................................... 18
CHAPTER 3: Looking at the Growing Need for

Database-as-a-Service............................................................ 19
Defining Database-as-a-Service......................................................... 19
Pinpointing the Pieces of the Database Puzzle............................... 20
Table of Contents iii
Reining in the Spiraling Costs of Databases.................................... 20
Slashing database maintenance time via automation.............. 21
Reducing risk by addressing critical skillset shortage............... 21
Dashing a Dream: Why “To the Cloud” May Fail You...................... 22
Understanding the appeal of the cloud...................................... 22
Facing the truth about cloud outcomes...................................... 22
Discovering the reality of spiraling cloud costs.......................... 22
Understanding cloud workload migration challenges.............. 23
Tearing apart the cloud puzzle: An exercise in complexity...... 23
Getting Cloud-Like without the Public Cloud................................... 24
CHAPTER 4: Introducing Nutanix Solutions for Databases.... 25

Discovering the Nutanix “Better Together” Approach.................... 25
Building a foundation with hyperconverged infrastructure..... 26
Constructing the walls: Erecting the elements that support
applications.................................................................................... 27
Operating database clusters........................................................ 28
Deploying Era database-as-a-service.......................................... 28
Discovering the Benefits of Nutanix Era........................................... 29
Database abstraction.................................................................... 29
One-click management................................................................. 30
Customizable resource catalog.................................................... 32
Customizable recovery SLAs......................................................... 32
A one-click time machine.............................................................. 33
A cloud-like experience................................................................. 34
Complete API to support integration opportunities.................. 35
Enjoying the Business Benefits of Era.............................................. 35
CHAPTER 5: Enhancing Oracle Database, Microsoft

SQL, and Other Database Environments................ 37
Improving Oracle Database Environments...................................... 38
Getting a handle on Oracle licensing........................................... 38
Understanding the challenges of supporting Oracle................ 38
Giving up on the UNIX and Oracle mashup................................ 39
Discovering how Nutanix addresses Oracle challenges........... 40
Addressing performance, availability, and protection.............. 40
Streamlining Oracle database management with
Nutanix Era..................................................................................... 42
iv Database-as-a-Service For Dummies, Nutanix Special Edition
Supercharging Your Microsoft SQL Server Environment............... 43
Improving efficiency and operations........................................... 43
Understanding the role of underlying infrastructure............... 44
Assimilating physical SQL Server instances................................ 44
How Nutanix transforms your SQL Server environment.......... 44
Addressing availability and data protection............................... 46
Enveloping SQL Server with application orchestration............. 46
Streamlining SQL Server database management...................... 46
Supporting Other Database Workloads........................................... 47
CHAPTER 6: Deploying, Operating, and Managing Nutanix

Solutions for Databases........................................................ 49
Enabling a Single Management Experience..................................... 50
Provisioning, Patching, and Upgrading Databases......................... 51
Enjoying the Ease and Savings of Copy Data Management........... 51
Eliminating Specialist Skills for Backup and DR............................... 52
Using Other Features such as Prism Pro and Flow......................... 52
Integrating ServiceNow and Other Tools......................................... 53
CHAPTER 7: Ten Reasons Why Nutanix Solutions for

Databases Make Sense.......................................................... 55
Table of Contents v
Introduction
A
new era of database management has begun. As with so
many other services, databases have now been imbued
with “as a service” goodness through various database-
as-a-service (DBaaS) deployments. However, whereas some
DBaaS solutions focus on a single platform or only on public
cloud-based databases, most enterprises instead need a multi-
platform DBaaS solution that supports workloads that run both
on-premises and in the cloud.
Moreover, at the same time that databases have become more

critical, database skills have become more scarce and increasingly
expensive.
What’s needed is a solution that fully streamlines the database,

from hardware to software to operations.
About This Book

In this short but exciting journey, you’ll learn how Nutanix
has tackled and tamed some of the most challenging aspects of
databases. From providing a robust platform on which to run
databases, to supporting databases on-premises and in the cloud,
to abstracting database management functions to create a com-
mon operational paradigm, Nutanix is helping organizations get
more from these important environments while also helping to
bring down costs.
Foolish Assumptions
For this book, I assume you have at least a basic understand-
ing of hyperconverged infrastructure and databases. The general
audience for this book is anyone in information technology who
wants to learn more about how databases can help address evolv-
ing business needs. The audience is intended to be technical staff
as well as managerial and executive staff.
Introduction 1
Icons Used in This Book
Throughout this book you’ll find a number of icons intended to
help you better understand and remember key concepts.
I use this icon when you need to stop for a second and make sure
you recall a key concept before forging ahead in a chapter.
You should keep certain details in mind as you analyze your own
data center environment. When you see the Tip icon, put that
information in your back pocket to save for later.
Although I don’t go super-deep into technical stuff in this book,

I provide some technical elements for you in various places. You
can find these marked with the Technical Stuff icon.
Beyond the Book

There’s only so much I can cover here. To learn even more about
how Nutanix can help supercharge your database operations, keep
an eye on www.nutanix.com/databases.
2 Database-as-a-Service For Dummies, Nutanix Special Edition
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Discovering the history of databases
»» Learning how databases have evolved to

meet emerging needs
»» Identifying the challenges that have

emerged in supporting database
environments
Chapter 1
Exploring Databases and
Their Evolution
F
or all the talk about how technology has transformed busi-
ness and how new innovations such as artificial intelligence,
self-driving cars, and ongoing digital transformation efforts
will continue to revolutionize the world, one common component
spans the spectrum and enables it all.
That component: the database.
People use the word database all the time, but many don’t truly
understand how transformative these structures have been.
They’ve enabled a complete rethinking of how to operate busi-
nesses, serve customers, and innovate technologies.
In this chapter, you discover the power behind the database, the
history of database technology and, perhaps most important,
the real and tangible challenges that databases can present for
already stretched IT resources.
CHAPTER 1 Exploring Databases and Their Evolution 3
Profiting and Propheting: Reshaping
the Bottom Line
Everything is in a database. The database era was initially sparked
by Charles W. Bachman, who created what was known as the
Integrated Database System, the first entrant into a class of prod-
ucts that would ultimately become known as Database Manage-
ment Systems (DBMS). The advent of the DBMS gave way to the
creation of COBOL, an early programming language still in wide-
spread use and designed to make it possible for businesses to
boost their bottom lines through the adoption of technology.
Discovering key business benefits

behind databases
Early systems were more like Rolodex card files and calculators,
but with computational capabilities and, more important, auto-
mation capabilities that could outperform any human. Businesses
around the globe raced to deploy their own database-centric sys-
tems to make sure that they could keep up with and eventually
surpass the competition. Thus, the Information Age was born.
Ever since, organizations have continued to churn hardware and
software in a continuous struggle to stay current, and maybe even
achieve the dream of a technology platform that was simple and
accessible to all members of the organization.
Despite the difficulty that databases can bring, companies would

no longer be able to function without them. Some of the benefits
of databases include:
»» Improved ability to handle data processing needs: In the

early days, businesses handled data in files, which were
increasingly difficult to relate to other information. These
challenges have been largely solved in modern systems and
a variety of database architectures are available to support
just about any use case.
»» Increased consistency in data: Databases can enforce
consistency in data gathering. Consistency enables automa-
tion of common business processes. Automation of pro-
cesses reduces the potential for human error and can
reduce overall cost to support a particular process.
»» Propheting: Whereas database solutions have traditionally
been intended to hold historical data, as the volume and
variety of data has increased, it’s become possible to make
attempts at predicting the future based on what’s happened
in the past.
Turning to databases to extract

business value
Not every business uses databases the same way, and some don’t
use them at all. Still, most do, and you would find it difficult to
point to any household name brand that doesn’t have databases
permeating just about every aspect of its organization.
Data and databases are often described as being commodities as

valuable as oil. As time goes on, the value of data to a business
increases, and database systems are required to support the orga-
nization’s burgeoning needs.
Meanwhile, as businesses seek to embrace data gathering activi-

ties of all kinds, new kinds of databases are necessary. The next
section gives you a look at where databases started and where
they are today.
Analyzing the Evolution of the

Database Landscape
Original databases launched in the 1960s and were a way to begin
to normalize what were primarily file-based data storage opera-
tions. The scenario in the early ’60s looks a lot like a mass of
Word documents today, at least outwardly. Although these forays
were critical in laying an innovation foundation, much more was
needed.
Rediscovering the original RDBMS

Today, when people think database, images of Oracle and Micro-
soft SQL Server immediately spring to mind. These systems are
included in a class of databases known as relational database
management systems (RDBMS), which got their start in the 1970s
based on the word of a mathematician named Edward Codd, who
was working for IBM at the time. Codd’s 1970 paper, entitled
“Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks,” was the
launching point for the entire RDBMS data industry, which trans-
formed how businesses operate.
As the “R” in RDBMS implies, databases in this category are rela-

tional in nature, meaning they can be inextricably linked to one
another to create massive interrelated datasets that are all cor-
related in some way.
The 1970s saw the first foray into RDBMS with IBM’s work on
System R in 1974, which was a research project into developing
an RDBMS. In 1979, the first commercial RDBMS hit the market,
portending a transformation into how business would be done.
That database: Oracle. You may have heard of it. You can learn
more about it in Chapter 5.
Evaluating the splintering of

database architectures
For years, the RDBMS has reigned supreme, conquering business
challenge after business challenge, but even these systems aren’t
suitable for every workload need. To address critical shortcomings
in RDBMS systems, new database architectures have sprung forth.
As data volume, velocity, and variety increased and as analysis

needs evolved, relational databases began to show their limits.
Scalability, for example, was a key issue. As databases became
more and more distributed, maintaining consistency and availa-
bility became increasingly problematic. Bigger scale in relational
systems translates to bigger performance problems as the num-
ber of partitions grows.
With those challenges in mind, some Very Smart People devised

new kinds of databases intended to address emerging data volume
and analytics needs.
The primary class of databases that was developed in the late

1990s and early 2000s is called NoSQL. No, this doesn’t mean SQL
is gone. The No in NoSQL stands for “not only” and means there
are a variety of new ways to handle data needs. The name is con-
fusing, particularly given the evolution. In 1998, a product named
NoSQL came to market with the promise that there was no SQL
code that needed to be written, but the term was later redefined
to be a bit broader in nature.
DATABASE CHARACTERISTICS:
PICK ANY TWO
In 1998, a man named Eric Brewer devised the CAP Theorem, which
states that it’s impossible for any database to achieve more than two
of the three primary database characteristics:
• (C) Consistency: In a consistent database, as soon as a write is

committed, any subsequent query against the database will always
be able to return the result of that write. You may have heard of
the term ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) applied
to transactions in RDBMS lore. Consistency is the cornerstone of
ACID-centric databases. Other database architectures may provide
something known as eventually consistent operations. This is very
different from a database that is always consistent.
• (A) Availability: Regardless of the node in a cluster, queries can
be successfully executed against current data.
• (P) Partition Tolerance: In the event that nodes are unable to
communicate, consistency and tolerance are still enforced.
In general, database products on the market support, at most, two of

these characteristics. For example, RDBMS systems, such as SQL
Server, support A and C, but not P. To be fair, this theorem is not
perfect, a fact that even its author admits, but it helps to bring clarity
to some of the challenges faced by organizations seeking the right
database architecture for their applications.
Various types of NoSQL databases are available on the market:
»» Key/value stores: Key/value stores are simple non-relational

places to store data. There is a key and a value. That’s it. The
value can be a simple attribute or can be more complex,
although these tend to support low complexity data. These
are highly scalable data systems.
»» Document stores (a specific type of key/value store):
Typically housed in XML or JSON files, document stores are
highly flexible records with an adjustable layout. They
contain key value pairs to enable sorting by any value. They
don’t join as nicely to other documents as more structured
data schemas, though.
»» Graph databases: A highly relational database model, graph
databases are comprised of nodes and relationships. A node
represents some kind of object or entity. Relationships are
then created to identify how nodes relate to one another.
Graph databases are highly scalable.
»» Column stores: Whereas traditional relational databases
store records in rows, columnar databases store data in
columns. The result is an ability to execute much faster
queries and increased scalability, important traits in
analytical applications. On the negative side, writes to
columnar databases are typically much slower.
Identifying key uses cases for

non-relational databases
The new kinds of databases described in the preceding sec-
tion were invented to solve the real challenges that were being
encountered in RDBMS products. These non-relational databases
were built to overcome some of the scaling and performance chal-
lenges caused by relational databases. Non-relational databases
are useful when you have vast quantities of data that need to
be stored and when you don’t need much in the way of joining
together disparate sets of data. On the scaling front, since there
isn’t a lot of relationship between datasets, you can more safely
distribute non-relational data across multiple storage environ-
ments or cloud providers.
Closing the door: Why open source

is becoming more closed
A couple of decades ago, open source databases were gaining
ground in terms of popularity and capability. Today, these solu-
tions, which include the popular MySQL and PostgreSQL products,
although still technically open source, bear a lot more resem-
blance to commercial closed source databases.
MySQL, for example, is now owned by Oracle. The database itself

still has open source elements, but many of the newer modules
are closed source. In the world of PostgreSQL, some cloud provid-
ers are forking PostgreSQL to further development with updates,
though the improvements don’t always make their way back to
the main PostgreSQL code base.
This is not to say that open source databases are a bad choice —
they’re absolutely not. But they aren’t always as open as people
would like to believe.
Identifying Legacy Database Challenges

Legacy database solutions, while transformational, are far from
perfect. Administrators need to overcome a number of challenges
that are inherent in these systems.
Why legacy databases aren’t

ready for modern needs
At inception, legacy database systems were revolutionary, but as
data needs have changed, many haven’t kept pace. They may not
provide organizations with the desired level of support.
Difficult to find and expensive

skillset needs
At the time this book was written, unemployment was at its low-
est rate in decades. Finding people is already difficult. Now, head
out and try to find candidates with deep skills in databases. And
finally, try to find people with salary expectations that fit the
budget and the skills you need.
It’s a difficult task. In fact, it’s extremely difficult in many areas of

the world. I speak from personal experience. When I worked for
a higher education organization in a rural area with budgets that
were not adequate, looking for knowledgeable database talent was
one of the hardest tasks I had to undertake.
Manual processes
Almost 75 percent of database management budgets are spent on
manual processes. Every time IT admins or DBAs engage in a man-
ual process, you waste precious time and incur additional opera-
tional costs. Eliminating manual processing does three things:
»» It reduces human error.

»» It saves critical time to focus on what’s more important.
»» It reduces cost.
Automation is the key to eliminating manual tasks and improving
efficiency.
Inconsistent performance
Many CIOs complain that their databases are slow and become
a bottleneck for business. The need for accelerated innovation
to drive growth continues unabated in this rapidly transforming
digital era. Databases, unable to match performance loads and
scale quickly enough to meet peak business periods, turn atten-
tion to IT, responsible for delivering the technology platform to
enable business growth. IT teams need a solution that puts them
back in control and the business back on track.
Inflexibility and complexity

When a data center is built around siloed operations, trying to
troubleshoot database performance issues or find ways to scale
performance can seem futile. Siloed data centers are inherently
rigid, and the segregated operations add complexity and take
away from productivity. When 72 percent of IT budgets are spent
on maintenance tasks rather than innovation, increasing infra-
structure agility through a more streamlined operational model
can significantly improve OpEx and free up IT resources toward
supporting new business initiatives.
Scalability also presents significant challenges, particularly the

inability to scale linearly. Legacy infrastructure often requires
overprovisioning resources to accommodate future growth. Once
you hit the storage’s performance and capacity limits, you’re
forced to contend with a forklift upgrade, a complex, costly, and
disruptive process that typically requires downtime. Scaling with
your database requirements isn’t easy when you’re using legacy
infrastructure.
Vulnerability
The combination of operational complexity and burdensome
manual work exposes your database to human error and puts
your business at risk for costly outages. In fact, 91 percent of data
centers experience unplanned downtime. CNBC reported that the
Capital One data breach in June of 2019 that affected over 100 mil-
lion people caused a significant drop in share value with potential
fines upward of $100 million. A simplified approach to your infra-
structure with proactive self-healing and recovery capabilities
helps ensure maximum data resiliency and business continuity.
Silos and low utilization
Silos are an all-too-familiar pain point for businesses operating
on legacy infrastructure. And although silos have a purpose in
addressing unique database and application demands, they drive
up direct capital costs, operating costs, and add to management
complexity, which leads to more troubleshooting, more mainte-
nance, and less time for other work. And for many organizations,
CPU utilization stays at a measly 20 percent, which calls for more
hardware and consequently, higher licensing costs.
But with all that extra equipment, you’re left with an environ-
ment that’s complex to deploy, manage, and pay for. The power,
space, and cooling requirements that that “extra” equipment
necessitates isn’t free, either.
Availability challenges
Data loss and poor application availability are major concerns for
most businesses, yet the truth of the matter is most business-
critical applications are underprotected. Why? Businesses relying
on legacy infrastructure to support their virtualized applications
often face too much downtime.
Those with legacy infrastructure often have legacy operations as

well, including strict maintenance windows. Maintenance win-
dows can cause unexpected downtime because multiple layers of
legacy architecture are involved and multiple teams take part in
maintenance processes. Even “routine” updates to underlying
storage systems, server infrastructure, or the database can create
long maintenance outages that result in the database being down.
Availability isn’t always a binary condition. That is, it isn’t just

that your database environment is up or down, but how well it’s
operating. If the environment is running well below expectations,
it isn’t as available as you may wish.
Underlying environmental characteristics play a huge role in

overall database availability. For example, if you provision stor-
age that doesn’t provide sufficient IOPS or that introduces high
latency or can’t maintain data throughput needs, that might be
just as bad as a database being unavailable.
Inability to leverage the cloud
The age of the cloud is here. More specifically, this is the age of
hybrid and multi-cloud. So, it’s no surprise more businesses want
to leverage the power of the cloud to run traditional enterprise
applications and cloud-native applications and databases.
But to utilize the power of hybrid and multi-cloud, your infra-

structure needs to support both — something legacy IT architec-
ture simply isn’t equipped to do. Many businesses aren’t able to
deliver cloud services to complement and support their database
environments, struggle with complex multi-cloud management,
and face costly data protection and disaster recovery expenses.
Converging analytical and

transactional databases
A relatively strict line once existed between transactional and
analytical databases. Transactional databases were used to sup-
port ongoing operations with routine processes being run to move
certain data elements to an analytical database. This separation
allowed organizations to run complex queries against analyti-
cal data without imposing a performance penalty on business
transactions.
The problem: There was often a delay of minutes, hours, or even

days in this “roll up” process. As businesses have started moving
faster, and as they seek to continuously automate processes, this
lag is no longer acceptable and real-time analytics is required.
The result has been a convergence of these kinds of databases,
which has created new management challenges for IT.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Learning about the pivotal role that
cloud plays in the database realm
»» Introducing yourself to database-as-a-

service and overcoming database-centric
challenges
»» Discovering how hyperconverged

infrastructure solves the IT
infrastructure challenges related to
databases
Chapter 2
Understanding Trends
Shaping the Database
Industry
T
his chapter turns to some current trends. From the cloud to
new kinds of infrastructure to new sources of data to the
edge and beyond, the database industry is being required to
constantly adapt to emerging and evolving needs. (For a review of
database history and the critical challenges facing database-
centric organizations, see Chapter 1.)
Understanding the Role of the Cloud

with Modern Databases
Given the fast pace of modern business, traditional enterprise
infrastructure is ill-suited to meet the growing demands of data-
bases like Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, SAP HANA, PostgreSQL,
MySQL, and others. Over the past few years, hyperconverged,
web-scale infrastructure has emerged as a better alternative.
CHAPTER 2 Understanding Trends Shaping the Database Industry 13
Hyperconverged infrastructure combines compute, storage, vir-
tualization, and networking resources with intelligent software
to create flexible building blocks that eliminate many of the pain
points of deploying and managing IT infrastructure to support
databases.
A solution such as Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure pro-

vides a cloud-like experience that can help organizations move
ahead in private or public cloud. That can help solve the infra-
structure side for on-premises workloads, but infrastructure
alone doesn’t always solve the software challenge.
Today, companies are looking at new and different kinds of data-

bases to solve key business challenges. Often, companies turn to
the cloud to give different database options a try. This enables
these companies to offload basic database administration tasks to
users in a self-service model, thereby gaining back valuable time.
In addition, the cloud’s promise of agility, flexibility, scale, and
potential cost savings offers outcomes that are difficult to ignore.
Understanding the Growth of Data

Perhaps the most significant contributor to database challenges
is the sheer rise in growth of data in multiple dimensions, all of
which start with the letter V. The three most critical “V”s are:
»» Volume: The quantity of data is its volume. The increasing

volume of data creates storage capacity challenges.
»» Variety: Different kinds of databases have been invented to
solve different data challenges. Many of these challenges
revolve around the variety of data that is being captured.
»» Velocity: The speed at which data must be ingested into a
storage system being used by a database is the data’s
velocity. As the volume of data grows, the variety of data
grows, and the number of data sources increases, cracks
begin to appear in infrastructure and the types of databases
in use. Users then turn to IT for solutions.
Pinpointing the sources of data sprawl
Why do so many data challenges exist? The answer: data sprawl.
The past decade has seen an explosion in the number of devices
deluging storage systems, and the edge has become an environ-
ment unto itself and a primary location from which data is gener-
ated. The edge consists of locations that may be outside the data
center, many of which generate vast quantities of data, including
remote office/branch office point-of-sale and security systems
as well as autonomous vehicle telemetry. The edge can include
Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, such as doorbells and other
connected devices, many of which generate petabytes of data that
has to be stored.
Data generated in all of these locations might be structured or

unstructured, but it all has to be managed in different ways.
Unstructured data needs a location in which to save everything
that’s generated, whereas structured data needs a database behind
it to capture pertinent information in a usable way.
Understanding the reasons behind

database sprawl
Unfortunately, saying that data has to be captured into a database
is a deceptively simple statement. The reality is that careful con-
sideration has to be made for each type of data, which may require
deployment of multiple types of databases in multiple locations,
including edge locations, the on-premises data center, and the
cloud.
In other words:
»» You need to match a number of types of databases to

individual applications, which increases your database
administration overhead.
»» You need infrastructure — whether on-premises or in the
cloud — to store the data.
But there’s more. Even if you create the perfect set of plans,
humans get in the way. You may have people in the organiza-
tion who constantly create copies of data for analytics, test, and
development purposes.
In short: You now have database sprawl on your hands from a
number of angles.
Identifying the impact of data

and database sprawl
The impact of database sprawl is significant on a number of fronts.
First, you face infrastructure considerations. The more data you

have and the more copies of that data you have, the more stor-
age you need. As your organization grows, you need to make sure
that you can easily expand your storage capacity to meet ongoing
business needs. This issue also affects network bandwidth and
other supporting infrastructure elements.
Next, you have to consider the operational impact. The more vari-
ety you have, the more technical overhead you incur. Every data-
base management system (DBMS) you deploy must be managed.
Every copy of your database that’s made for any reason requires
some level of management to ensure that your analytics are using
current information.
Reigning in database copies

Copy data management in the world of storage is important
and is most often applied to databases. Cloning and data refresh
processes are necessary for business advancement, but open up
new problems. Cloning requires backup set identification along
with any log files that are needed for clone creation. The data-
base administrator (DBA) must first locate the backups (tapes or
secondary sources) and then perform a complex recovery pro-
cess that includes setting up the database server, connecting to
the database, restoring database backups, and finally replaying
the database logs to a specific time. Then the DBA must regu-
larly refresh all these database copies and clones with the source
data to be useful. Now imagine scaling that effort to hundreds of
databases to support different groups (test/dev, BI, QA, and so on)
within the organization.
As you can imagine, there must be a better way.
ARE DATABASE COPIES REALLY A
PROBLEM?
You might wonder if this is a solution without a problem. Well . . . it
isn’t. IDC’s 2016 report on Copy Data Management (CDM) showed that
77 percent of the organizations surveyed have more than 200 data-
base instances while 82 percent have more than 10 copies of each
instance. The typical DBA must provision, manage, refresh, restore,
and perform other database operations for 2,000 database instances.
Reshaping the Industry with

Database-as-a-Service
Database-as-a-service (DBaaS) is a recent entrant into the as
a service market — and it’s a welcome one. The intent behind
DBaaS is to solve the challenges this book discusses.
In the Nutanix world, DBaaS is intended to bring powerful data-

base management methodologies of cloud to on-premises data-
bases on your terms. No longer do organizations have to choose
between local complexity and cloud expense in terms of database
management.
Nutanix’s Era DBaaS offering enables database administrators to

enjoy the same type of simplicity and automation that Nutanix
brought to their infrastructure services. Database provisioning,
patching, and lifecycle management become invisible in the same
way that Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure makes infra-
structure invisible. Copying a database becomes as easy as the
copy and paste operations on your computer.
By bringing database provisioning, lifecycle management, and

copy data management into the Era realm, Nutanix is help-
ing organizations tackle the really hard parts of database
administration.
You can learn much more about DBaaS in Chapter 3.
Seeing How Containers and
Microservices Affect Data
Containers and microservices have emerged as the preferred
method to construct modern applications. Containers and
microservices are often ephemeral in nature and epitomize the
term just in time by launching services only when they’re needed,
thereby minimizing footprint and increasing flexibility and scal-
ability, and also enabling much higher levels of application mobil-
ity between operating environments.
Databases are uniquely affected by containers because their out-

comes are somewhat mutually exclusive. Containers want to live
just long enough to handle their discrete task and then they want
to destroy their data and await their next iteration. Databases, on
the other hand, want to store their data in perpetuity.
In the world of containers, databases are just more on-demand

objects, with each application potentially having its own database.
Thus, the potential for database sprawl in these environments is
high. IT pros must turn to technologies such as DBaaS to help
keep the madness under control.
Discovering Hyperconverged
Infrastructure
Many of the challenges in database administration revolve around
underlying infrastructure inefficiency and inflexibility. Hyper-
converged infrastructure provides organizations with a set of
efficient resources with the flexibility to easily scale as needed.
Running low on storage? Add a node. Running low on RAM? Add a
node. Running low on CPU cycles? Add a node.
Additionally, the right hyperconverged infrastructure solution

provides additional services to help you keep database sprawl in
check.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Discovering how database-as-a-service
helps you simplify your environment
»» Learning why the public cloud may not

always meet your expectations
»» Understanding two key database

challenges facing organizations today
Chapter 3
Looking at the
Growing Need for
Database-as-a-Service
D
atabase-as-a-service (DBaaS) has the potential to truly
transform how organizations manage their database envi-
ronments. More than that, it has the potential to help
organizations do more with their database environments. With
databases being the real currency of business, any ability to fur-
ther extend their use can only mean good outcomes, but only if
that increased use comes without high cost and complexity.
Defining Database-as-a-Service
DBaaS is software that enables organizations to:
»» Significantly reduce the manual effort inherent in database

administration by automating routine processes and
standardizing processes across database platforms through
the use of a single console, which can enable self-service for
database users
CHAPTER 3 Looking at the Growing Need for Database-as-a-Service 19
»» Ensure that database support structures are in place and
operational, including snapshots, cloning, and backup
»» Streamline higher level administrative tasks, including
patching
»» Provide a mechanism for making database copies for
analytics or test/dev
»» When DBaaS is coupled with a compatible hardware
environment, provide a comprehensive platform that takes
the guesswork out of resource provisioning
Pinpointing the Pieces of the

Database Puzzle
“Deploy a database” is a seemingly simple directive fraught with
many underlying needs. For every database you deploy, you need
to consider a wide variety of other needs, including:
»» Backup
»» Security and compliance
»» Availability
These can be hard items to configure and each requires specific
expertise to get right. But all are critical, particularly for data-
bases that underpin the business.
Reining in the Spiraling Costs

of Databases
As useful as they are, improper or incomplete database adminis-
tration processes enable costs to spiral out of control — assuming
you can even find the database skills your company needs.
DBaaS aims to solve this problem in a number of ways, as the fol-

lowing sections explain.
Slashing database maintenance
time via automation
Manual operations massively increase costs in two key ways. The
first way is right in the name — manual. Every time someone has
to touch something, there is a cost. Inefficient manual processes
take away from other potentially valuable activities. What if you
could redirect the efforts of these people to activities that add
value?
The second way manual operations increase cost is through

increased error. Humans are imperfect and mistakes are sim-
ply a part of the journey. No matter how experienced you are,
you might accidentally delete the student database for an entire
school district in the middle of a workday (want to ask me how I
know?) and then have to frantically recover it from the previous
day’s backup.
Or, you may just have to create a multitude of database copies for
various people to use.
What if you could automate some of your most common data-

base administration tasks? With a DBaaS solution, this dream can
become a reality.
Reducing risk by addressing

critical skillset shortage
Finding good database talent is difficult. Even finding someone
who can reliably manage a single database platform is hard. Now,
imagine trying to find the unicorn who can manage a bunch of
platforms with ease and make sure everyone’s operational needs
are met across these silos.
The risk is real. If you manage a database incompletely or incor-

rectly, this currency of your business’s value can tank, just like
the stock market on a bad day. Although a DBaaS solution won’t
completely eliminate the need for certain database-centric skillsets,
it will make it much easier for a generalist to carry out the most
important administrative tasks and make sure that the database
is backed up and protected.
Dashing a Dream: Why “To the Cloud”
May Fail You
A bunch of years ago, a major IT company had a truly cringewor-
thy ad series on TV with an actor kicking off each commercial
by saying, “To the cloud!” The goal was to convince people that
moving to the cloud is super easy . . . barely an inconvenience.
This is not always the case. Organizations need a way to assess

workloads before simply throwing them over the cloud wall.
Understanding the appeal of the cloud

It’s easy to see why companies like the idea of cloud so much. It
has a huge appeal to bean counters who want to pay for only what
you use and not a penny more. The cloud is also handy when you
need to get something into place quickly. After all, everything is
right there and ready to run.
When it comes to databases, there are a plethora of options avail-

able in the cloud as well, and they’re basically turnkey, at least
to start. If you need something good and fast, the cloud has its
appeal for database workloads.
Facing the truth about cloud outcomes

The trough of disillusionment generally comes to pass at some point
in the lifecycle of every technology. This term means the hype
that accompanied the technology’s introduction has faded and
people have realized that the new entrant to the technology mar-
ket will not solve every problem faced by customers.
Cloud has gone through this process. Early cloud claims were the
stuff of legend, but not everyone achieves the kinds of outcomes
they’d hoped for.
Discovering the reality of spiraling

cloud costs
Perhaps the biggest shock is the cost of cloud. Many organizations
made the jump into the cloud without clear guidelines or govern-
ance and went on to face monthly invoices that would make the
national debt pale in comparison.
Companies have started to get smarter about cloud costs and far
fewer treat cloud as “credit card-based IT” than before. Still,
making sure cloud costs stay in check requires constant vigilance.
It also requires watching the price lists of cloud providers to make
sure you’re adopting the right service for the right workload.
Understanding cloud workload

migration challenges
Story time.
“We’ll just move that application to the cloud.” A program man-

ager with a consulting firm uttered that simple statement. The
application happened to be a client/server application with a
dependency on a local database server and a requirement to run
the client locally as a native Win32 application.
They moved it to the cloud.
And then they had to deploy a bunch of Remote Desktop Services

servers so that the Win32 application could continue to operate in
close proximity to the cloud-based database server.
And then they had massive networking issues.
This was an extreme version of lift-and-shift gone wrong. The

application in question never should have been moved to the
cloud. It didn’t belong there. All too often organizations have
taken this approach in a misguided effort to extricate themselves
from the on-premises data center business only to find that
they’ve made a huge mistake and have to migrate certain work-
loads back on-premises.
Tearing apart the cloud puzzle: An

exercise in complexity
Every cloud provider is different. They offer different kinds of
service tiers, different add-on products, and, in keeping with the
topic of this book, different database options.
Beneath all of this is a maze of pricing options, integration needs,

and hidden charges. Different kinds of databases and workload
instances are available, and worst of all, every provider has its
own unique way to do all of this. Ultimately, you either need to
become an expert or figure out a way to abstract all of it so you
can work with a common platform.
Getting Cloud-Like without the
Public Cloud
The great thing about modern technology is that there’s an option
for everything. Today, you can get cloud-like without having to
buy the cloud. With hyperconverged infrastructure, you get a con-
sumable platform that is easily scalable. With Nutanix DBaaS, you
get a database management and abstraction layer that provides a
level of simplicity you may not have known even existed.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Finding out why a complete Nutanix
environment provides maximum benefit
for your workloads
»» Discovering a new era of database

administration
»» Learning about the critical business

benefits enjoyed via Nutanix Era
Chapter 4
Introducing Nutanix
Solutions for Databases
S
upporting databases is generally one of the most important
tasks for any IT infrastructure or platform. With the right
combination of hardware and software, you can unleash
your IT department’s true capabilities and go from zero to hero.
But it takes the right platform, and that’s where Nutanix’s suite
of products comes into play. Nutanix’s solutions for databases
help you focus IT’s efforts on what matters to the business.
Discovering the Nutanix “Better

Together” Approach
At inception, Nutanix sold hardware appliances that combined
servers, storage, and a hypervisor. Today, the company still pro-
vides hyperconverged infrastructure solutions but has made the
jump to a software platform that can run atop just about any
compatible hardware on the market.
CHAPTER 4 Introducing Nutanix Solutions for Databases 25
It’s also moved well beyond its hyperconverged roots. The follow-
ing sections introduce a range of Nutanix software options which,
when combined, can supercharge your environment.
Building a foundation with

hyperconverged infrastructure
There’s no such thing as a software-only data center. At some
level, you always need hardware on which to run that software.
The same is true of hyperconverged infrastructure. Once upon a
time, hyperconverged solutions shipped in heavy server boxes.
That’s still an option today, but a focus on simplicity has resulted
in hyperconverged infrastructure software that runs on compati-
ble commodity x86 servers from your favorite server vendor.
Simplified infrastructure
Regardless of the server vendor you choose, Nutanix’s hypercon-
verged infrastructure software forms the basis for your database
environment. It becomes the underlying foundation for everything
else you do. It’s quite literally at the core of your environment.
Hyperconverged infrastructure provides a simplified technology

infrastructure that combines all the necessary resources under
one roof. Nutanix also brings to this paradigm its own hypervisor,
with the twofold responsibility to
»» Further reduce infrastructure costs

»» Be able to extend the hyperconverged infrastructure’s core
services beyond servers, storage, and compute and enable
advanced services, such as microsegmentation and more
Enabling myriad database scaling

capabilities
Databases scale in different ways. In-memory databases need
RAM. Relational databases need compute and data storage. NoSQL
databases need storage. A hyperconverged infrastructure founda-
tion makes it possible to easily scale these resources practically
on demand and without the hassle that comes from trying to scale
more traditional resources.
Flexible storage
Storage capacity is one thing, but storage characteristics are
another. Some databases do just fine with block storage provided
by the environment, while other databases prefer file or object
storage.
In another feat of flexibility, Nutanix makes all three storage

types available in their hyperconverged infrastructure platform.
Now, you don’t need to go on the hunt for a storage system that
can do it all and you don’t have to deploy multiple storage plat-
forms to support the needs of different types of databases.
Intelligent tiering
Intelligent tiering is a process by which Nutanix storage continu-
ously monitors data access patterns and places workloads in the
location that is most optimal, all without the user having to get
involved. This allows you to run multiple tiers of storage without
worry. Let the system choose where to place data and then move
data between tiers based on current application requirements.
Data locality
The closer your data is stored to the CPU, the better your perfor-
mance will be. Since the beginning, Nutanix has focused on data
locality to ensure that data is always at a location that maximizes
performance. Locality makes sure that your data resides on a local
node and, as workloads shift around the cluster, performs rebal-
ancing operations behind the scenes to keep workloads where
they belong.
Constructing the walls: Erecting the

elements that support applications
The prior section talks mostly about hardware elements. Although
all the hardware in a Nutanix environment is driven by software,
those hardware resources are really important to enable the rest
of the Nutanix software stack.
The Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure platform includes all

of the hardware and software needed to operate a robust set of
IT workloads and services. From the hyperconverged software
itself to the administration tools, such as Prism Pro, this all-
encompassing package alone provides IT departments with a lot
of cost and operational benefits.
The platform also enables organizations to improve their over-
all security posture via Nutanix Flow, a microsegmentation layer
that brings security benefits to all of the applications that run in
the environment.
Moreover, thanks to a flexible design, the Nutanix platforms

provide customers with choice in terms of backup and disaster
recovery and make these services available both on-premises and
in the cloud through Nutanix Mine backup and Xi Leap disaster
recovery.
The Nutanix Xi cloud services portfolio enables organizations to

adopt a hybrid cloud architecture without the pain and guesswork
that often accompanies such undertakings.
Spanning the entire services spectrum enables Nutanix custom-

ers to deploy workloads across clusters that span the multi-cloud.
Workloads can operate on-premises or in various public cloud
providers.
Operating database clusters

Database clusters can be tough to deploy and even tougher to
maintain. When clusters are coupled with multi-cloud environ-
ments, the challenges increase exponentially thanks to the oper-
ational variances between such environments.
In true hybrid cloud fashion, you’ll gain the ability to run data-
bases in public and private cloud environments but centrally
manage them without having to worry about where they’re oper-
ating. The result: You’ll enjoy increased flexibility, simplified
operations, and increased efficiencies by running your databases
on Nutanix.
The beauty of the Nutanix solution for databases is that it nor-

malizes the database operating environment, regardless of
locale. No longer do you need to learn how to operate in separate
environments.
Deploying Era database-as-a-service

And that’s what supports Nutanix Era.
Nutanix Era builds on Nutanix hyperconverged infrastruc-

ture (HCI) to automate and simplify database management. It
delivers the best of both worlds by bringing the flexibility and
operational simplicity of DBaaS without the restrictions of single-
vendor solutions that are database, cloud provider, or location/
deployment-specific.
Four key Era service pillars are designed to support different pro-
duction and dev/test use cases:
»» New database and database server provisioning

»» Copy data management (cloning/snapshots)
»» Data protection (backup and in-place recovery)
»» Database patch management
»» True hybrid cloud database management
»» Cluster capabilities
Era leverages all these elements and enables an unprecedented
level of database flexibility.
Discovering the Benefits of Nutanix Era

Adopting Nutanix Era offers a number of benefits, described in
the following sections.
Database abstraction
Abstraction has proven to be an incredible innovation in
IT. Through abstraction, administrators gain access to a com-
mon administrative experience regardless of the underlying
database engine. In the case of Nutanix Era, administrators can
manage various database products via common console, shown in
Figure 4-1, thereby eliminating one major aspect of complexity
from the equation.
At the time this book was written, Nutanix Era supported the
following:
»» Oracle 11.2.0.4.x, 12.1.0.2.x, 12.2.0.1.x, 18.0.0.0.x, and

19.0.0.0.x
»» PostgreSQL 9.x, 10.x, and 11.x
FIGURE 4-1: Nutanix Era shields administrators from underlying database
complexity.
»» SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 and above, SQL Server 2012, SQL
Server 2014, SQL Server 2016, SQL Server 2017, and SQL
Server 2019
»» MariaDB 5.5, MariaDB 10.0, MariaDB 10.1, MariaDB 10.2,
and MariaDB 10.3
»» MySQL 5.6, MySQL 5.7, and MySQL 8.0
»» SAP HANA 1.0, SAP HANA 2.0
Don’t confuse what is supported by Nutanix Era with what is sup-
ported running on top of Nutanix HCI. Although Era supports a
subset of the database platforms on the market, the HCI platform
supports a huge array of databases.
The abstraction element brings a shared administrative experi-

ence to all the supported databases for routine operations, includ-
ing provisioning databases, cloning, snapshots, backing them up,
and undertaking patching operations.
One-click management
Automation and normalization of common functions across data-
base platforms drives down costs and reduces the potential for
human error.
Provisioning
Nutanix Era hides the complexity of database operations and pro-
vides a set of common APIs, a CLI, and a GUI that work across
multiple database engines. Nutanix Era allows DBAs to define
standards for their database provisioning needs with end-state
driven functionality that includes HA database deployments for
mission-critical clusters. The Era provisioning service includes
the ability to deploy new database engines, including support for
patches, as well as new databases.
Backup/restore
Era provides a one-click backup utility that works on any sup-
ported database. No longer do you have to corral multiple unwieldy
processes to make sure that your mission-critical databases are
protected, nor do you need to pore over documentation from mul-
tiple database providers to figure out the different ways that each
protect their data. Use zero-byte snapshots that require minimal
overhead to perform in-place restores of a database quickly with
no data loss.
Copy data management

You likely have a whole lot of copies of your databases strewn
about your environment. You may have production clones being
used in test, or a snapshot being used for an analytics tool. If so,
you face a number of challenges, but two big ones are the need
for storage to keep all those copies and the time it takes to create
clones as you need them.
Nutanix Era helps by taking zero-byte clones and snapshots, which

reduce the time required to duplicate databases as well as the stor-
age capacity needed for multiple database copies. Save 6x in stor-
age by using Era clones versus creating manual database copies.
Patching
Like all software, database products have to be patched to pro-
tect against vulnerabilities and each one has its own process for
carrying out updates. Nutanix Era brings to all supported data-
bases the ability to “push button, get patched.” It’s a way to help
take some of the burden out of database management and to sim-
plify database operations while helping organizations reduce risk.
Customizable resource catalog
The Era catalog is a standardized repository for databases with
custom software images tailor-made to enterprise needs, includ-
ing PSUs and one-off patches. It provides some automation
services that execute pre- and post-database creation scripts
automatically. It also helps you deploy databases that require
complex high availability, such as Oracle RAC.
The Era resource catalog stores customizable database profiles

for software, compute, networking, and database parameters and
makes it dead simple for even novice administrators to carry out
database admin duties, as shown in Figure 4-2.
FIGURE 4-2: Nutanix Era shields administrators from underlying database

complexity.
Customizable recovery SLAs

Nutanix Era offers you the opportunity to create various sophis-
ticated and customizable recovery SLAs for continuous, daily, and
monthly recovery point objectives (RPOs), as shown in Figure 4-3.
You can match SLAs against the importance of the protected data-
base and predefine or customize SLAs on the basis of business
requirements.
FIGURE 4-3: Customizable SLAs allow you to protect databases bases on
criticality.
A one-click time machine

What if you could revert to an earlier copy of a database with just
a click? What if you could just an easily make a copy of a database
with the same level of effort?
If the fact that I’m even asking likely leads you to believe that
these tasks are both possible, then count yourself correct!
Nutanix Era time machines capture and maintain snapshots and

transactional logs of your source databases as defined by the
schedule you create. For every source database you register with
Nutanix Era, a time machine is created for that source database.
You create clones and refresh clones to a point in time, which is
accomplished by using transactional logs or snapshots.
These are time-efficient and space-efficient incremental redirect-

on-write snapshots that are ideal for medium- to long-term
protection needs. When creating clones, you need just a few
minutes to have a copy of your database ready to go, complete
with production quality of services. Era’s zero-byte database
clones allow you to restore to any point in time.
As you need to refresh databases, you can do so in a few minutes

with just one click. This capability makes the time machine service
perfect for supporting both greenfield and brownfield databases.
To ensure database and application consistency, Era uses data-

base quiescing services that use native APIs, such as RMAN for
Oracle.
A cloud-like experience
The Nutanix database platform, which includes the hypercon-
verged infrastructure core as well as additional services such as
Era, is intended to imbue your on-premises IT architecture with
cloud-like capabilities in terms of scale and management. The
public cloud provides a great deal of abstraction to normalize
resource management and to allow you to focus squarely on out-
comes rather than getting too far into the weeds.
This is also true of Era and its time machine functionality. Here’s
a look at what happens invisibly under the hood of Era when you
onboard new databases:
»» Discovers the logical layout of the database.

»» Maps the physical disk resources underlying the database.
»» Creates a data protection domain entity.
»» Creates a time machine entity tasked with maintaining the
SLA.
»» Deploys an Era agent or collector on the database host.
»» Era performs a few additional smaller actions to prepare the
database entity for management. After activating the time
machine construct, it takes the first snapshot of the data-
base and OS.
And that’s just one example. Era provides a number of other pro-
cess automations that bring simplicity and an abstracted, cloud-
like experience to the equation.
Complete API to support integration
opportunities
Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of the cloud and of modern
software-defined data centers is the inclusion of robust APIs
across infrastructure and software silos. These APIs bring infra-
structure and infrastructure support services into the clutches of
developers and can even be brought into CI/CD pipelines.
APIs enable organizations to undertake custom automation tasks

that can help further streamline business processes. Nutanix Era
is no exception and brings the tool into your existing self-service
environment such as those from ServiceNow or VMware.
Enjoying the Business Benefits of Era

The technical benefits of Era are clear, but it also has several busi-
ness benefits:
»» Enable test and development environments: Setting up

robust test and dev environments used to be painful even
without having to keep them current. Era enables a seamless
test and development experience with one-click mainte-
nance ease.
»» Address the IT skills shortage: Can’t find Robust MariaDB
admin skills? No worry! Common administrative tasks are a
breeze thanks to Era’s abstracted simplicity.
»» Reduce database operational CapEx and OpEx expenses:
Automation saves money on the OpEx front, but Era’s
oversight of how your database is operating can help you
reduce your CapEx spending as well.
»» Improve SLAs: With all-manual processes, SLAs can be
tough to adhere to. Era’s one-click nature makes sticking to
agreed-upon service levels simple.
»» Streamline support: You can integrate ticketing systems
with Era’s APIs or other automation suites you may already
be using for their application’s life cycle management.
»» Improved operations: You’ll more easily delegate tasks to
other groups, such as app and DevOp groups.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Discovering how to corral spiraling
licensing costs for common database
platforms
»» Seeing what challenges are inherent in

supporting Oracle and Microsoft SQL
Server and how Nutanix can enhance
these platforms
»» Ensuring data protection via an

abstracted database management
console
Chapter 5
Enhancing Oracle
Database, Microsoft SQL,
and Other Database
Environments
T
he purpose of database-as-a-service (DBaaS) in general
and Nutanix Era specifically is to supercharge your database
environment by making it simple and consistent to manage.
Databases have gained a reputation over the years for being fin-
icky, expensive, and overbearing. In this chapter, you discover
how to enhance your current capabilities around Oracle, SQL
Server, and other database platforms.
CHAPTER 5 Enhancing Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL, and Other Database Environments 37
Improving Oracle Database
Environments
As it has for so long, Oracle continues to dominate the market it
entered in 1979. Oracle’s position in the industry is well-known
and, while the product’s technical capabilities are lauded, other
aspects of the solution are, well, not held in as high regard. These
lesser-considered aspects include licensing, platform, and other
challenges.
Getting a handle on Oracle licensing

For those running Oracle databases, dealing with licensing is a
fact of life. It’s well-known in the industry that Oracle licensing
is strict, expensive, and complex. Most CIOs do everything pos-
sible to optimize their Oracle licensing costs, but inefficiencies
and lack of real insight into their database environments make it
complex task.
Oracle’s licensing requires careful attention and is strictly based

on the contract between the customer and Oracle. Nutanix will
work with customers to design a target Nutanix platform that is
sized to run the customer’s databases efficiently, meeting their
performance, operational, and growth requirements. Nuta-
nix provides guidelines to help customers optimize their Oracle
licenses on the basis of publicly available Oracle licensing docu-
ments on processor core factor and partitioning.
Nutanix Era takes things a step further by providing administra-

tors with a cohesive view of the database environment, including
all instances. This helps database administrators control database
sprawl and uncontrolled use of available database licenses.
Understanding the challenges

of supporting Oracle
Oracle presents some unique support challenges in virtualized
environments. Determining who should get the first call in the
event of an issue — Nutanix or Oracle — can be difficult. Nutanix
support removes that obstacle. When an issue may be related to
an Oracle application, Nutanix support works with Oracle sup-
port through TSANet’s well-defined collaborative processes (both
Oracle and Nutanix are members) to achieve the best possible
outcome.
The licensing challenges have forced some administrators into
siloing their Oracle environments onto dedicated hardware. The
result: expensive infrastructure and low utilization. Just as in the
days of physical infrastructure, seeing Oracle servers operate at
15–20 percent of capacity isn’t uncommon, leaving a lot of wasted
resources.
In some virtual environments, data storage results in compute

and actual data storage residing far away from one another, at
least from the perspective of applications. The result: Overall per-
formance suffers as latency increases.
On data protection and high availability, Oracle has requirements

that can sometimes require specialized hardware and software.
The result: high complexity and protection gaps in environments
that cost too much to operate.
The Oracle architecture mashup means that some organizations

may have too many layers of technology that must be protected.
Without comprehensive and well-integrated software and hard-
ware, these give rise to security gaps. The result is a potential for
security issues.
Giving up on the UNIX and

Oracle mashup
If you’re still hosting Oracle on servers running Unix, you prob-
ably know that it’s past time to think about changing. Unix adds a
lot of complexity and cost thanks to proprietary architectures and
the need for complex SAN infrastructure.
Although it has committed to continuing support for the platform

until 2034, Oracle has reduced the engineering staff working on
SPARC and Solaris by 90 percent. The level of support for HP-UX
is similarly uncertain and sure to diminish further over time.
The hyperconverged design of Nutanix Enterprise Cloud offers an

alternative for enterprises transitioning from legacy Unix envi-
ronments. Nutanix can help you deliver the performance, data
protection, and availability your operations need, while accelerat-
ing new deployments, facilitating application development, sim-
plifying management, and increasing security.
Discovering how Nutanix addresses
Oracle challenges
Nutanix Solution for Databases provides a database environment
that enables performance, availability, and scalability. The hyper-
converged nature of the solution brings virtualization, storage,
compute, networking, and security into a simple scalable environ-
ment. And there is data to prove it! IDC reports that the combina-
tion can reduce overall operational costs by 62 percent and reduce
unplanned downtime by an incredible 85 percent (https://www.
nutanix.com/go/nutanix-enterprise-cloud-tco-roi).
Specifically for Oracle, moving from current bare metal servers to

virtualized ones in the Nutanix Solution for Databases means that
your Oracle environment immediately benefits from all the oper-
ational advantages of virtualization, including significant reduc-
tions in overall operating costs.
Addressing performance, availability,

and protection
On the performance front, Nutanix’s ability to keep data close to
compute — data locality — means you get a better overall response
time for your database applications.
Traditional architectures require storage requests to traverse the

network to be managed by a storage controller. As database work-
loads increase, storage controllers may reach performance capac-
ity. Between the introduction of additional network traffic and the
potential overload of a far-away — relatively speaking — storage
controller, the result can be enemy number one for application
performance: latency.
Data locality is not only about storing new data on the local node.
It can also keep relevant useful data local when needed, which
reduces latency. The result is a significant performance increase
for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads. The main fac-
tors that contribute to this performance increase are zero depend-
ence on the network for read traffic and a 50 percent reduction in
network usage for write traffic. These factors have been corrobo-
rated and quantified by thousands of customers running database
workloads on the Nutanix platform. As usage and requirements
increase, you can simply add a new node in minutes, which imme-
diately adds storage and compute resources without requiring
an expensive, downtime-ridden forklift upgrade. When you add
nodes, databases can enjoy near linear scaling of performance and
availability. The ability to scale up and out in a cloud-like fash-
ion allows you to fractionally consume resources as performance
and capacity requirements increase. This capability eliminates the
need to overprovision with costly, underutilized resources that an
organization may grow into over three to five years.
A simpler administrative experience provides easier software

upgrades that can translate to improved availability and contrib-
ute to lower costs.
For more technical availability needs, there’s Oracle Real Appli-

cation Clusters (RAC). Nutanix has demonstrated that its soft-
ware and hardware can be tuned to meet and exceed performance
requirements of Oracle RAC clusters running on Nutanix Enter-
prise Cloud with any hypervisor supported by Oracle.
For situations when it isn’t possible to migrate your Oracle data-

base off the existing physical infrastructure, Nutanix Volumes —
a block storage server available natively on the Nutanix Solution
for Databases — delivers great I/O performance to databases
running on external bare-metal hardware. Although this feature
won’t get you to maximum infrastructure consolidation, it can
allow you to consolidate your storage and replace expensive and
hard-to-manage SAN environments.
Nutanix Solution for Databases lets you continue to use famil-

iar Oracle database data protection tools such as RMAN and Data
Guard with little or no modification to your existing procedures.
If you’ve been using native snapshot and replication capabilities
on SAN storage, Nutanix provides similar functionality with an
important difference. In a virtualized environment, the majority
of operations are performed on individual VMs or virtual disks.
This makes traditional storage that operates at the level of LUNs
or volumes — that often contain tens or hundreds of VMs —
difficult to use efficiently. Nutanix performs all operations in a
VM-centric way that eliminates the complexity of managing the
individual disks that support the databases in the VM.
Nutanix Cloud Platform lets you can store months’ and years’
worth of space-efficient snapshots locally or at a secondary loca-
tion (another appliance, cluster, or the public cloud). Replication
to a remote system protects against disasters. Nutanix has auto-
mation capabilities and a range of options to meet your RPO and
availability needs.
Nutanix has also introduced NearSync replication, which pro-
vides the best of both worlds: zero impact to primary I/O latency
(like asynchronous replication) and a very low RPO (like synchro-
nous replication). This feature allows users to have a very low
RPO without the overhead of requiring synchronous replication
for writes.
Streamlining Oracle database

management with Nutanix Era
Efficient Oracle application development depends on the ability
to set up and tear down development and test environments rap-
idly using automated processes. Production data copies used in
development and test processes must be as current as possible to
ensure code quality. Other cases always arise, making it critical
for development teams to work with datasets that are as current
as possible.
Nutanix Era facilitates provisioning and copy data management,

the most time-consuming element of maintaining development
and test environments. By extending one-click simplicity to pro-
visioning, Era allows database admins to create a cloud-ready
standardized catalog for their database services. Database admin-
istrators (DBAs) can create profiles for their database engines
to standardize compute, network, and database parameters.
Era allows you to accelerate database provisioning from weeks
to minutes with one-click operations that automate provision-
ing and self-service for IT teams. You essentially get to create
your Oracle database instance on demand, allowing your dev/test
teams to keep up with the speed of the business.
Era captures your database states for any specified service level
agreement. It allows DBAs to create fully functional database
copies with one-click operations and refresh existing copies with
Era’s time machine capability. Era’s time machine preserves
databases, guarantees established SLAs, and makes them availa-
ble quickly to the application and database users. It utilizes Nuta-
nix Cloud Platform’s native snapshots and the database-specific
transaction logs under the hood to achieve this. The capability to
clone databases in minutes with minimal storage overhead allows
dev/test deployments to maintain consistency with production,
and allows the deployment for DevOps up to ten times faster
(https://www.nutanix.com/company/customers/valpak).
Supercharging Your Microsoft SQL
Server Environment
Although Oracle currently sits atop the database market share pile,
Microsoft SQL Server has, for years, worked to dethrone the king
and appears to have the potential to do so in the not-too-distant
future. Like Oracle, SQL Server’s popularity means it’s easy to
identify where there are challenges supporting the platform.
Much like Oracle, SQL Server also benefits from Nutanix’s web-
scale architecture. Database deployments must meet or exceed,
not only on the performance and availability requirements of SQL
Server-based workloads, but DBAs must also efficiently manage
complete database lifecycle tasks in minutes. Moreover, every-
thing must remain simple to deploy, manage, and scale.
Database performance has long been the primary criterion for

selecting infrastructure. Solutions that support SQL Server work-
loads must handle a dynamic mix of transactional (OLTP) and
analytical (OLAP) databases, along with their unique storage I/O
profiles. Both compute and storage must easily scale — while
maintaining performance — to accommodate new and existing
databases. A Nutanix Database Platform is ideal for the mixed SQL
Server workload requirements through data locality. By keep-
ing the data near the database, the inefficiencies of pulling data
across the network for queries is essentially eliminated, signifi-
cantly reducing latency. With Nutanix Era, you can deploy SQL
Server instances in minutes — not days or weeks — with best
practices-based standards, including complex AG deployments.
Improving efficiency and operations

When you look at SQL Server databases deployed on physical
hardware, utilization may suffer and a lot of resource overhead
goes unused, not due to SQL Server issues, but rather due to an
inefficient hardware environment. However, some organizations
choose to deploy SQL Server to physical hardware to keep per-
core licensing counts in check while retaining sufficient capacity
to operate critical workloads, so it becomes a bit of a balancing act
to make it all work.
The reality is that administrators end up focusing their time on
managing overhead rather than on direct value-add activities.
Understanding the role of underlying

infrastructure
Infrastructure — physical or virtual — is obviously an important
consideration in achieving SQL Server outcomes. An inefficient
infrastructure leads to poor performance and spiraling expenses.
In a purely physical environment, a constant replacement cycle
necessitates the need for routine migrations to new database
servers, which can be complex and create risk for an organization.
Assimilating physical SQL Server

instances
Sometimes you can’t avoid the need for a physical SQL Server
deployment, but you still want to be able to leverage a hypercon-
verged environment for as much as possible. Nutanix Volumes
allows you to deliver robust I/O performance to databases running
on other hardware while keeping the databases running where
they are. Best of all, you get to avoid having to use an expensive,
complex SAN.
How Nutanix transforms your SQL

Server environment
Nutanix Solution for Databases leverages web-scale engineering
and consumer-grade design to natively converge compute, virtu-
alization, and storage into a resilient, software-defined solution.
The result is predictable performance, exceptional availabil-
ity, cloud-like infrastructure consumption, robust security, and
seamless application mobility to support the Microsoft SQL Server
environment.
These outcomes are beneficial to SQL Server when migrating

from older SQL Server platforms. Era makes it possible to quickly
deploy a newer SQL Server system that adheres to SQL Server best
practices. Thanks to Era’s cloning capabilities, you can clone leg-
acy databases to the new database server with the end result being
a fully supported, compliant solution that takes full advantage of
Nutanix’s architecture.
For example, when migrating from SQL Server 2012 to SQL Server
2016, you get the benefits of running on a fully supported plat-
form as well as non-disruptive upgrades, an integrated security-
first design, out-of-band patch management, and improved
performance.
Extending SQL Server into the cloud

Increasingly, IT teams need to integrate on-premises opera-
tions with the public cloud. Nutanix Solution for Databases con-
verges private, public, and distributed clouds, bringing one-click
simplicity to hybrid cloud environments. The ability to have
centralized operational management and lifecycle management
across public and private cloud environments simplifies database
management and can reduce costs. You gain increased agility and
can deploy databases without losing the simplicity and control of
having a “single pane of glass” for database management.
Embracing best practices while

replatforming SQL Server
With most applications, you need to consider a series of best
practices. With SQL Server, these best practices revolve around
correctly sizing your environment — CPUs, storage, RAM, net-
work and so on.
Specific guidance on SQL Server is beyond the scope of this book,

but for more information, refer to https://www.nutanix.com/
go/virtualize-microsoft-sql-server-hyperconverged-
infrastructure.
Nutanix Era is suitable not only for SQL Server deployment, but for
maintaining baselines for database versions, patching, compliance,
and security standards. When you remove manual, error-prone
human deployments, availability increases, along with DBA and IT
administrator efficiency.
Addressing availability
and data protection
Microsoft provides a variety of high-availability options to pro-
tect your SQL Server Environment, including AlwaysOn Availabil-
ity Groups and Failover Clusters.
With Availability Groups (AG), SQL Server replicates transac-

tions in real time between nodes and provides fast failover times.
However, this approach doubles the amount of storage required
because each node has a full copy of the database and transaction
logs. You can use hypervisor HA to help minimize server down-
time as well. AGs serve as a built-in disaster recovery solution, if
you replicate an AG to a second or third data center.
SQL Server AGs are the modern and much preferred HA solution
for SQL Server 2016 and later. If your application does not support
the use of AGs, log shipping is an alternative. Log shipping is an
older technology, but it may have wider application compatibility.
Enveloping SQL Server with application

orchestration
Nutanix Calm cloud management enables developers and
DBAs to access the resources they need at any time using self-
service. They simply consume custom blueprints from the Nuta-
nix marketplace. For example, you might create a blueprint for a
SQL Server test environment and make it available in the market-
place. Any time a DBA or developer needs a new database or a test
environment, they can then request it and have it be automati-
cally provisioned according to standardized configurations.
Streamlining SQL Server database

management
Nutanix Era database management provides an abstraction layer
that normalizes common database functionality across platforms.
Whether you’re modernizing an aging SQL Server environment or
deploying a new one, the Nutanix Database Solution combines the
simplicity, performance, scalability, and availability of hypercon-
verged infrastructure design with DBaaS capabilities.
Nutanix DBaaS builds on Nutanix HCI to deliver a DBaaS environ-
ment that provides the best of both worlds for SQL Server. Nutanix
provides a platform that virtualizes and brings all your database
engines under one roof. One-click operations make monitoring,
optimizing, and managing all your databases simpler and faster.
Nutanix added modern cloud-ready DBaaS capabilities that auto-
mate and eliminate much of the administrative load commonly
associated with databases. The result is a SQL Server solution that
performs well and is always available, secure, and cost-efficient.
Supporting Other Database Workloads

Nutanix supports all commercial databases on its hyperconverged
infrastructure platforms. Workloads such as SAP HANA, IBM DB2,
Mongo DB, Sybase, PostgreSQL, and so on, can be found running
on Nutanix HCI. Era currently supports deploying and manag-
ing multiple database platforms. In additional to Oracle and SQL
Server, Nutanix Solution for Databases supports PostgreSQL,
MySQL, and MariaDB, providing the same dataset services func-
tionality across database platforms.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Discovering how a single database
management control plane transforms
database operations
»» Patching and upgrading database

engines quickly and easily
»» Seeing why an API-first architecture

allows Nutanix solution to easily
integrate with your existing enterprise
tools and processes
Chapter 6
Deploying, Operating,
and Managing Nutanix
Solutions for Databases
H
ow, exactly, do you get yourself up and running on a
Nutanix solution for your database environment? The
initial value of running databases on Nutanix comes from
the HCI platform, which provides simplicity, scalability, availa-
bility, performance, and cost control in the form of fractional
consumption.
Combine this with the Nutanix database-as-a-service (DBaaS)

offering and you can have a common database control plane
for multiple database products, deploy databases in minutes to
hours versus days or weeks, back up with snapshots and an API
that integrate with third-party backups, customize pre- or post-
database deployments with data masking capabilities, reduce copy
data costs with zero-byte clones and snapshots, and deploy auto-
mation that reduces management overhead on break fix activities.
Whew!
CHAPTER 6 Deploying, Operating, and Managing Nutanix Solutions for Databases 49
A perfect example is when you use Nutanix Era to deploy a data-
base. You not only deploy it faster, but the deployment streamlines
database provisioning based on best practices and your organiza-
tion’s defined standards. These best practices are not only data-
base engine best practices, but also Nutanix best practices to take
advantage of the Nutanix architecture. This combination allows
you to take full advantage of everything that the solution has to
offer.
Enabling a Single Management

Experience
All the talk of a common control plane or a single management
experience should be considered from a hybrid context. This
means that databases may sit on-premises, on one or more public
clouds, or in DR/replication architectures that span all. Consider a
use case where you host a production database cluster such as SQL
Server Always On availability group (AG) on premises on Nuta-
nix and add read-only replica copies running on Nutanix in both
Amazon and Azure. This is truly a hybrid/multi-cloud operating
model.
By having a common control plane, the admin has a similar, if not

identical, user experience whether they’re provisioning for SQL
Server, PostgreSQL, or Oracle, but they still have the customiza-
tions that are relevant to each database engine without having to
move into a different management interface and user experience
for each individual engine.
In addition, DBAs maintain control of policies and can delegate

tasks to other people, such as project managers, developers, and
testers. This essentially frees up their time for other activities and
the delegate doesn’t need to learn special skills for each database
engine or environment.
Provisioning, Patching, and Upgrading
Databases
Deployment is just a part of the administrative equation and it
takes a lot of guesswork out of the equation. The full Nutanix HCI
+ DBaaS solution transforms patching processes to remove com-
plexity, particularly for HA database environments. The goal is to
eliminate database patching-related downtime.
One of the biggest pain points for DBAs is keeping up with database
patches and updates. They want to eliminate database configu-
ration and version sprawl and standardize patching, regardless
of platforms. They also want to be able to see what versions of
databases are in the environment and apply patches, including
security patches, in a timely fashion.
Nutanix Era simplifies patching by providing on-demand patch-

ing automation. Each database is associated with a patching pro-
cess. Once a new patch is tested and published to the catalog, the
DBA can choose to schedule updates of all targeted databases and
deploy it in an automated fashion.
Here is a link to a demo that shows an overview of provision-

ing a PostgreSQL database via Era: https://nutanix.com/
provisioning-postgres.
And, here’s a look at how patching is accomplished with Era:

https://nutanix.com/era-patching.
Enjoying the Ease and Savings of Copy

Data Management
Copies of data are absolutely everywhere and they’re out of con-
trol. That said, when it comes to legitimate database copies, cre-
ating them should be as easy as the copy and paste operations on
your computer, even for databases that are terabytes in size.
For enterprise databases, the requirement is not just to copy and

paste a particular instance, but to also have the ability to create
clones from any point in time. With Nutanix Era, you get a one-
click database copy-and-paste operation from any point in time.
Even better, the clones and snapshots created via Era are space
efficient because they are zero-byte database clones. Moreover,
this process means clone creation is super-fast.
Watch this video for a look at how Era helps solve copy data
management challenges: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
IRPY-LHtou8&t=13s.
Eliminating Specialist Skills for

Backup and DR
That common database control plane doesn’t just make things
easier for experienced DBAs. It also means people without spe-
cialized database skills can carry out what would otherwise be
complex functions.
For example, with Nutanix Era, you can back up your database
without learning a separate console. The single pane of glass pro-
vided by Era allows you to create space-efficient snapshots repre-
senting full backups. From there, with just a single click, you can
refresh instances. And you aren’t limited to new database envi-
ronments. You can drop Era into your existing environment and
gain a consumer-grade restoration experience.
Using Other Features such as

Prism Pro and Flow
The database solution is only part of the stack. Nutanix’s DBaaS
environment includes all the underlying infrastructure manage-
ment elements so that you gain an encapsulated solution that
reduces pain points. You get comprehensive management from
Prism Pro as well as a stack that includes security solutions such
as Nutanix Flow. Flow is a microsegmentation tool that allows
you to isolate a database server that may contain a critical secu-
rity exploit but that you need to retain in production. You can use
Flow to isolate that database until you can remediate the security
vulnerability and then “un-isolate” it with microsegmentation.
Integrating ServiceNow and Other Tools
Nutanix Era has an API-first architecture that can be easily inte-
grated with preferred self-service tools. The robust API enables
integration with existing self-service tools such as ServiceNow
and, through Nutanix Calm, you can create blueprints for deploy-
ing databases through Era APIs.
Nutanix has available a number of resources to help you under-

stand the power of the API:
»» API Equivalent of UI Actions in Nutanix Era: https://youtu.

be/15Z8nOxXzCs
»» Example of integration with ServiceNow integration:
https://youtu.be/maVFpTSH1ys
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Achieving the benefits of
database-as-a-service
Chapter 7
Ten Reasons Why
Nutanix Solutions for
Databases Make Sense
D
atabase-as-a-service (DBaaS) is made possible by Nutanix
through the deployment of a set of comprehensive hard-
ware and software elements. This combination brings a
number of benefits:
»» A simplified administration experience: With Era, part of

the Nutanix Solutions for Databases, administrators gain
one-click access to common database operations, including
database provisioning, backup, and replication.
»» Normalized database administration: Era provides
cross-platform support to a variety of databases, including
Oracle, SQL Server, MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
»» Less reliance on hard-to-find skills: Era’s streamlined and
consistent administrative experience brings an ease of use
to database administration and reduces reliance on skillsets
that are in short supply and that, when found, are expensive.
CHAPTER 7 Ten Reasons Why Nutanix Solutions for Databases Make Sense 55
»» A complete solution: Bundled with a hyperconverged
infrastructure platform that provides management, a
hypervisor, compute, storage, networking, and security, the
Nutanix database solution is a complete package that
provides a solid foundation for mission-critical workloads.
»» Reduced database licensing costs: With additional insight
into the database environment and improved control over
database provisioning, organizations may be able to reduce
their overall database licensing costs, which can be
substantial.
»» Faster time to value: A streamlined experience without
reliance on complex skills means that developers can
develop faster, data scientists can analyze faster, and
organizations can get faster outcomes from their database
environments.
»» Database copies reined in: Era’s copy data management
capability helps organizations implement repeatable, reliable
processes for routine database refreshes for test, develop-
ment, analytics, and other scenarios.
»» Multi-cloud ready: You’re likely running applications in the
cloud already and you need the ability to operate workloads
wherever it makes sense. Nutanix’s database solutions bring
this need to production in an easily manageable and
cost-effective way.
»» Multi-layered security: Era and Nutanix database solutions
offer a number of security advantages. First, Era’s built-in
patching mechanism makes staying current a breeze.
Second, the solution’s inclusion of Nutanix Flow offers a
number of additional security options that prevent intrusion
into databases and offer the ability to isolate databases that
have known vulnerabilities.
»» Simple scalability: Database environments aren’t static.
They require constant attention and, for many businesses,
require the ability to constantly grow. Nutanix hypercon-
verged infrastructure brings simple scalability to the
database equation from a hardware perspective and, from a
software perspective, Era’s consistent administration
features mean that growth doesn’t come with the baggage
of increased complexity.
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Go to www.wiley.com/go/eula to access Wiley’s ebook EULA.

Database As A Service

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Database As A Service

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Database As A Service

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Database-

ISBN 978-1-119-70614-4 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-70615-1 (ebk)

Manufactured in the United States of America

CHAPTER 1: Exploring Databases and Their Evolution................. 3

CHAPTER 2: Understanding Trends Shaping the

CHAPTER 3: Looking at the Growing Need for

Table of Contents iii

CHAPTER 4: Introducing Nutanix Solutions for Databases.... 25

CHAPTER 5: Enhancing Oracle Database, Microsoft

iv Database-as-a-Service For Dummies, Nutanix Special Edition

CHAPTER 6: Deploying, Operating, and Managing Nutanix

CHAPTER 7: Ten Reasons Why Nutanix Solutions for

Moreover, at the same time that databases have become more

What’s needed is a solution that fully streamlines the database,

About This Book

Although I don’t go super-deep into technical stuff in this book,

Beyond the Book

2 Database-as-a-Service For Dummies, Nutanix Special Edition

»» Learning how databases have evolved to

»» Identifying the challenges that have

That component: the database.

CHAPTER 1 Exploring Databases and Their Evolution 3

Discovering key business benefits

Despite the difficulty that databases can bring, companies would

»» Improved ability to handle data processing needs: In the

4 Database-as-a-Service For Dummies, Nutanix Special Edition

Turning to databases to extract

Data and databases are often described as being commodities as

Meanwhile, as businesses seek to embrace data gathering activi-

Analyzing the Evolution of the

Rediscovering the original RDBMS

CHAPTER 1 Exploring Databases and Their Evolution 5

As the “R” in RDBMS implies, databases in this category are rela-

Evaluating the splintering of

As data volume, velocity, and variety increased and as analysis

With those challenges in mind, some Very Smart People devised

The primary class of databases that was developed in the late

6 Database-as-a-Service For Dummies, Nutanix Special Edition

• (C) Consistency: In a consistent database, as soon as a write is

In general, database products on the market support, at most, two of

Various types of NoSQL databases are available on the market:

»» Key/value stores: Key/value stores are simple non-relational

CHAPTER 1 Exploring Databases and Their Evolution 7

Identifying key uses cases for

Closing the door: Why open source

MySQL, for example, is now owned by Oracle. The database itself

8 Database-as-a-Service For Dummies, Nutanix Special Edition

Identifying Legacy Database Challenges

Why legacy databases aren’t

Difficult to find and expensive

It’s a difficult task. In fact, it’s extremely difficult in many areas of

»» It reduces human error.

CHAPTER 1 Exploring Databases and Their Evolution 9

Inflexibility and complexity

Scalability also presents significant challenges, particularly the

10 Database-as-a-Service For Dummies, Nutanix Special Edition

Those with legacy infrastructure often have legacy operations as

Availability isn’t always a binary condition. That is, it isn’t just

Underlying environmental characteristics play a huge role in