Expanded Enterprise: Class Database Protection - Now for IBM DB2

The combination of enterprise companies going through digital transformation and the rapid growth in IoT, mobile, and tablet devices means there is a huge amount of data that needs to be managed and analyzed. For many organizations, rapid order fulfillment and real-time insights are critical to the success of their organization and IBM DB2 for Linux, Unix and Windows (LUW) has become their database of choice because it is designed to store, analyze, and retrieve the data efficiently. DB2 LUW databases are frequently used in industries such as manufacturing, business services, finance, insurance, and retail.

While DB2 LUW does provide a few native backup and recovery options, these native tools often lack robust functionality and have some limitations. They:

• Lack the flexibility required to meet demanding SLAs
• Offer no protection against ransomware attacks
• Create data silos that increase operational complexity
• Lack the ability to create policies and schedule backup jobs from a single unified management plane.

In Cohesity’s ever-expanding database portfolio, we are excited to announce the addition of DB2 LUW into our database data protection portfolio. This new DB2 LUW support delivers to our customer’s simplicity through automation, exceptional performance, ransomware protection, and unified management across on-premises and cloud-based systems. With the 6.6.0d release, we have extended our existing support for IBM DB2 LUW by providing a turn-key, fully automated protection solution.

Cohesity customers can now discover, register, and keep their DB2 databases protected with policies that configure backup frequency, retention, archival, and replication. In addition, Cohesity enhanced optimization that allows organizations to leverage the Cohesity scale out architecture to improve write and read performance of backups and restore.

Through Cohesity Helios, a multi-cloud data management platform, both IT, database, and backup admin teams can view the status of their data, log backups, and restore jobs, all from a centralized user interface. They can also view a summary of backup and recovery activity, identify the latest recovery points, and quickly identify which backups need attention. In addition, IT, database, and backup admins can now generate reports and receive alerts on the status of all backups and restores.

Cohesity allows you to do all this without affecting the ability of DB2 admins to perform on-demand backup and restore operations, if needed, using native tools such as IBM Data Studio.

Simplify Your Workflows

Cohesity delivers its powerful policy automation by directly integrating with a DB2 agent. All you have to do is deploy the Cohesity OS agent, followed by the DB2 LUW agent. Then register your DB2 LUW hosts with Cohesity DataProtect where all the DB2 instances in the environment are discovered, and then you can assign a Cohesity policy of your choice.

DB2 LUW Solution Benefits

There are many factors that go into selecting the right data protection solution for your database applications. It is important to ensure that the solution meets your needs not just today, but well into the future. You will want a solution that can address several key considerations, including:

• Simplify Operations. Admins use IBM Data Studio for most of their day-to-day activities, and data protection is an integral piece of DB2 administration. Cohesity abstracts the complexity by integrating with these tools, so customers can continue to use IBM Data Studio for their day-to-day operations, and manage their backups and restores from Cohesity Helios. Even infrastructure and backup admins who are not well versed with these management tools can configure a backup and perform a recovery using Cohesity’s single pane of glass interface.

• Automation. In large-scale deployments of DB2 databases, manual management of file-based backup (NFS) is not scalable and a significant pain point, that can delay upgrades and consumes valuable administrator time. Cohesity’s DB2 agent is a self-managed package that does not require any manual steps on the DB2 server apart from deploying the DB2 agent and the Cohesity OS Agent. From there, everything that is required, including any DB2 configuration, is automatically handled by Cohesity.

• Point-in-Time Recovery. In a typical Dev/Test environment, be it on-premises or in the cloud, admins get frequent requests to roll back a database to an earlier, stable version. Cohesity delivers point-in-time recoveries for DB2 databases by leveraging data and log backups. By rolling log backups forward, on top of the data backups, Cohesity can pick from any granular recovery point in the DB2 database.

• Protection against ransomware attacks. Cohesity offers multi-layer protection against for even the most sophisticated ransomware. With immutable backup snapshots, WORM, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and RBAC for granular access control, Cohesity keeps the backup data and the platform secure against attacks. The machine learning-based anomaly detection scans the backup data to detect potential ransomware on the production environment. We also have the ability to recover using the backups in case of a ransomware attack on your production environment.

• Across All Environments. Whether customers have deployed their DB2 databases on-premises or in the cloud, protecting mission-critical data is always crucial. Cohesity’s software- defined data protection solution allows enterprises to protect their DB2 databases regardless of the deployment model.

Features of the Cohesity DB2 LUW Agent

In addition to the above benefits listed above, here are some key features of the Cohesity DB2 LUW agent:.

• Backup types – Supports fulls, incremental, delta, and log backups
• Flexible restore – Iin addition to restore to the original server, it allows for alternate restore on a different server with the same database instance or new instance name.
• Global deduplication on all backups to reduce storage requirements
• Built-in scale out capability to improve backup and restore performance

Conclusion

Cohesity is committed to providing simplified backup and rapid recovery solutions for your DB2 databases. Whether your DB2 systems are on-prem, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment, Cohesity delivers a robust, plug-and-play approach for your mission-critical DB2 environments today and into the future.