by Angela Guess
A recent article argues that built-in NoSQL backup systems aren’t enough to protect your data. The article states, “The built-in redundancy of distributed NoSQL architectures leaves many with a false sense of security. But alone the out-of-the-box is not enough to satisfy backup requirements. Consider the reasons for backup: availability and persistence. Just like traditional RDBMS, without special consideration out-of-the-box NoSQL paradigms fail on both accounts.”
It continues, “Availability guarantees data access in event of equipment failure. Indeed, NoSQL replicates data across nodes which protects against server failure. But what about site failure? What if the data center hosting your NoSQL cluster experiences a service outage? You could find yourself in serious trouble. Okay, so lesson 1, you want to deploy your system with disaster recovery (DR) enabled to distribute your data across different data centres. Luckily many emerging big data platforms have this option built-in, and for some it was a salient design consideration (unlike most relational platforms).”
The article goes on, “Persistence protects data from loss in the event of data corruption, user error or malicious users. Data replicas enable restoration of the data set to a particular point in time. By itself, most NoSQL just maintain the current state of data; they do not track previous versions. Even for schemes with versioning, as with any live system the platform itself is not the right place for persisting data, you simply cannot afford the storage space. For lesson two, you need to include a retention mechanism. You can apply traditional snapshot schemes that copy the entire cluster. But the resulting copies include the built-in replication factor that protects against server failure.”
