Microsoft SQL Server is the database of choice for a wide range of business-critical enterprise applications. These deployments demand high-performance, low-latency primary storage, and robust data protection to ensure application availability. The combination of high performance requirements and rapid growth can cause ballooning storage costs. What’s more, existing disk-based backup solutions are expensive, and can result in long backup windows, excessive restore times, and inadequate disaster recovery protection.

Nimble Storage CS-Series iSCSI arrays and Nimble Protection Manager provide a compelling converged storage, backup, and disaster recovery solution for SQL server environments, dramatically reducing the cost and complexity associated with growing primary application deployments.

Benefits for SQL Deployments

Nimble’s breakthrough CASL™ architecture is designed from the ground up to leverage flash memory in combination with high-capacity, low-RPM drives to provide high performance for demanding SQL-based primary applications. SQL-optimized capacity optimization and zero-copy cloning enable additional cost savings for typical SQL deployments. Plus, built-in backup and WAN-efficient replication enables dramatically better data protection than traditional disk-based backup approaches, at a significantly lower cost.

Nimble enables customers to:

• Optimize Performance for SQL-Based Applications
  Nimble arrays ship with pre-defined SQL performance profiles, optimizing storage performance for commonly deployed SQL applications without extensive configuration or tuning. Nimble’s flash-based architecture delivers very high performance for multiple business-critical databases on a single array, thanks to its efficient flash usage and highly efficient compression of SQL data sets. The net result is significantly faster responsiveness for common SQL-based operations such as queries and daily reports.

• Instantly Backup and Restore Applications
  SQL-based applications typically experience high change rates, leading to long backup windows with traditional approaches. Nimble eliminates backup windows by enabling instant backups on the same array. Backups are on the order of milliseconds and do not impact database or application performance. Nimble Protection Manager (NPM) ensures backups and replicas are fully database and application consistent through integration with the Microsoft VSS framework.

• Improve Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs)
  Nimble enables enterprises to replicate frequent backups spaced just minutes apart (instead of the typical daily backup), allowing much finer RPOs and improving data protection.

• Faster Recovery Times
  IT managers can restore application components or VMs within seconds from integrated backups. In the event of a site failure, application availability is ensured by simply failing over to a remote replica of the primary data. When the primary site becomes available, all intermediate data changes are synchronized with the primary array, and applications can be failed back to the original site.

• Cut Costs
  Nimble arrays ship with a built-in SQL profile that optimizes its high performance inline compression technology for SQL data sets, leading to 4x primary capacity reduction for many SQL databases. Zero-copy cloning enables multiple copies of databases with no incremental capacity consumption. Additional cost savings come from the elimination of a separate backup tier.

• Faster Application Development
  Nimble’s zero-copy cloning technology can enable large numbers of instant, highly efficient database clones. This allows developers to instantly create copies of a production database, test new schemas or queries in isolated sandboxes and then promote these development volumes to production when they are satisfied with their testing. Combined with the dramatic capacity savings of the zero-copy clones, this provides a powerful platform for SQL application development.

• Simplify Management
  The intuitive Nimble UI eliminates the complexity of provisioning and managing separate storage, backup, and disaster recovery devices. It removes administrative overhead of managing massive data copies between tiers and simplifies management of application-consistent backups and replicas for all common Microsoft applications and databases, as well as Hypervisors such as VMware ESX and Microsoft HyperV.