Exploring Clumio for SQL Server backup in AWS (SQL Server backup part 3 of 3)

Welcome to part three of a three-part blog series on backing up SQL Server databases running on AWS. This series will cover SQL Server backup concepts, implementation options and methods in depth. Part three details Clumio’s solution for backing up SQL Server running in AWS, including practical instructions. If you find this content helpful, you can download the complete ebook.

The previous blog in this series covered several methods for backing up SQL Servers running on AWS, the inherent limitations with each of these methods, and the resources required to manage backups across different SQL Server deployments.

Now let’s further explore how Clumio can be used by DBAs / DBEs as well as cloud infra / IT teams to gain robust, reliable, and hassle-free backups for SQL Server on AWS. Whether you are running SQL Server on Amazon RDS, on Amazon EC2, or on VMC on AWS, Clumio can provide a secure, unified, and simple solution that overcomes many of the limitations of the other backup methods.

Introduction to Clumio

Clumio is a backup and recovery solution that helps AWS customers build resilience into their applications, databases, data lakes, and sensitive information. Air-gapped and immutable by design, Clumio helps organizations recover instantly from ransomware and operational disruptions, automate data compliance, and optimize storage costs. Customers choose Clumio for 4 key reasons:

1. Simplicity: With no hardware or software to deploy, along with an intuitive UI and a rich API, Clumio makes backing up even highly complex and interwoven data services simple.
2. Security: Clumio securely air gaps customer data in an immutable vault that is encrypted and MFA’d. Clumio’s data storage is in compliance with leading ISO, medical, and financial standards.
3. Architectural efficiencies: Clumio is architected as a stateless data processing pipeline, leveraging a proprietary serverless orchestration engine that gives it a scalability of exabytes per customer, change tracking of thousands of API operations per second, and incredibly fast recovery.
4. Cost performance: Clumio is not only optimized to reduce backup footprint, it also includes 24/7 engineering support in its consumption based pricing.

Let’s explore the architecture that makes all this possible.

Architecture

1. As shown in the figure, all you need to start using Clumio is an AWS account with SQL Server instances.
2. Simply login to your AWS account and invoke Clumio through a CloudFormation Template or Terraform.
3. Clumio sets up a dedicated, immutable, and air gapped environment on its portal to store your backups.
4. Clumio does not deploy any external agents, and once granted IAM permissions, works with the Amazon EC2 Systems Manager (SSM). For Amazon RDS and VMC on AWS deployments, Clumio uses direct APIs of the respective services.
5. Clumio then takes incremental, application-consistent VSS snapshots from the SSM agent periodically, and combines it with continuous transaction log tracking to ensure each change is captured.
6. Clumio’s serverless workflow engine ensures consistent, queryable, and efficient storage of the data and metadata of the backed up database on scale-out object storage.
7. Clumio secures the backup vault with its own rotating keys, and optionally, customer-provided keys as well.
8. Clumio backups are incremental forever, ensuring fast backup and restores, and lowering overall cost.

Let’s explore how to implement Clumio backups of SQL Servers in AWS.

How to backup Amazon RDS SQL Server

The first few steps are common across the three deployment models of SQL Server.

1. Create a Clumio account and login.
2. Verify IAM permissions required to deploy Clumio on support.clumio.com.
3. Login to your AWS account.
4. Within Clumio, add your AWS account details.
5. Kickoff creation of the CloudFormation stack or initialize the Clumio Terraform provider in the Terraform registry.
6. Confirm connection status on Clumio shows ‘Connected’.

For detailed instructions or troubleshooting, hop over to support.clumio.com. Next, backup your Amazon RDS environment to Clumio using these simple steps.

1. Once your account containing Amazon RDS instances is connected, define a Clumio RDS policy indicating when snapshots or backups of your Amazon RDS instances should be generated and the retention period for this data.
2. Create a Protection Rule to apply this policy to your Amazon RDS resources based on tags, and across accounts and regions. This automates your backups. Clumio will retain the latest snapshot in your environment for incremental backups. The snapshot will then be updated according to your policy definition.

As mentioned earlier, Clumio offers snapshot recovery, point-in-time recovery, as well as SQL query-based granular retrieval for Amazon RDS.

How to backup SQL Server on Amazon EC2

1. From the Clumio AWS Environment page, add SQL server hosts and assign IAM permissions using the CloudShell command.
2. Install Clumio executables which will connect the SQL server host to Clumio.
3. Ensure all nodes in your Always On Availability Groups are added to Clumio to backup from the secondary mode, eliminating performance impact on the DB.
4. Apply backup policies at the Availability Group level for Always on Availability Groups and ensure backups run from the selected replica. You can also apply policies at the host or individual database level.

Clumio backs up SQL on EC2 databases whether they are in full or simple recovery mode. If the database is in full recovery mode, there are two ways to recover: Point-in-time recovery or full database recovery. Simple recovery mode allows for full database recovery only. Clumio also supports SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) backups.

How to backup SQL Server on VMC on AWS

1. Install Clumio Cloud Connector in your VMware environment.
2. Install Clumio executables on each VM that has SQL Server installed.
3. Check your Clumio dashboard to confirm connectivity.
4. Apply Clumio protection policies to the SQL Server VMs.

For a more in-depth experience, download the complete ebook including diagrams & content not included here. If you haven’t already, you can read the first and second blogs in this three-part series.