Backup and Restore Windows Workloads through Nimesa

Overview

Windows is one of the popular choices of operating systems used in enterprises, and a lot of critical enterprise components like Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, MySQL, and Active Directory are deployed by enterprises. One of the key tasks of an administrator is to have a robust backup and recovery plan.

As the data grows, the traditional way of backing (i.e. Moving the files from the host to the backup target) is not feasible as they are time-consuming and they stress the environment. Nimesa by leveraging native AWS snapshot services and integrating with Microsoft VSS framework provides instant application-consistent snapshots of Windows instance

AWS runs nearly 2x more Windows Server instances than the next largest cloud provider, according to an IDC report.

Benefits

Since Nimesa uses snapshots it is able to provide the following benefits.

  • Instant application-consistent protection with Microsoft VSS based protection
  • Instant copies of application data for Test and Dev use cases
  • Provides Point In Time copies of application data by using VSS Writers
  • Instant restore of applications irrespective of the size of the data
  • Granular recovery Databases, tables, files and disks

Using snapshots along with VSS is very significant. Consider backing 500 GB SQL databases on a daily basis, the following cost is associated with native backups.

  • S3 Storage
  • Need to provision additional CPU and Memory to take advantage of compression and to lower the S3 storage cost
  • Local storage is needed to store the backup before uploading to S3

Nimesa System Overview

At a high level, there are 2 main components to the Nimesa system

  • Nimesa Server – Orchestrates the backup stores the metadata
  • Nimesa Agent – Acts as a VSS requestor and SQL client and coordinates with backup restore and clone operations
Nimesa System Overview

Backup Workflow

Below flow chart depicts a high-level flow of backup workflow in a windows environment

Nimesa Backup Workflow

SQL Restore Workflow

Below flow chart depicts a high-level flow of restore and recovery workflow of a SQL database in a windows environment

Nimesa SQL Restore workflow

About Nimesa

Nimesa is an enterprise-class Application Aware data protection, cost management & copy data management solution for applications running on AWS. It uses native AWS capabilities like EBS snapshots capabilities to automatically protect the environment. Nimesa provides simple policy based lifecycle management of snapshots and clones of EC2 instances.

Try Nimesa for free