Aster Data nCluster Database to Include Massively Parallel Online Backup

Aster Data, dedicated to providing analytics and management platform for ‘Big Data’ applications, announced that Aster nCluster and nCluster Cloud Edition leverages its ‘Always Parallel’ architecture to deliver high performance online backup and restore capabilities without system or application downtime. Aster nCluster Online Backup, included as a key feature in all editions of the nCluster database, is available today.

                     nCluster Cloud Edition
        is a high-performance analytic database

Aster nCluster Online Backup is based on a unique architecture that uses a distributed compute cluster of dedicated backup servers, called a Backup Cluster. The Backup Cluster architecture uses massive parallelization for providing backup and restore speeds required at the petabyte scale while the system stays online to process queries and load fresh data. For disaster recovery, a Backup Cluster can reside in a location that is geographically separated from the primary nCluster database, or in the cloud through services like Amazon EC2 or AppNexus.

"With Aster nCluster’s Online Backup we can take our entire cluster full and incremental back-ups while the nCluster is running, data being loaded, queries being executed and the best part, it is also highly scalable for optimal backup performance," said Lenin Gali, Director of Business Intelligence, ShareThis. "We can back up 7TB data, and we can do it under 4 hours with distributed backup cluster on AWS. The process took less than half the time we had expected."

Aster nCluster Online Backup allows for data to be compressed before it is sent to the backup servers. This minimizes backup storage requirements as well as data transfer over the network, speeding up both backup and recovery processes. Compression ratios in the range of 3X to 12X are typical, depending on the nature of data being backed up. Multiple nCluster databases can compress data and back it up to a single Backup Cluster, providing an opportunity to consolidate backups and reduce costs.

Backup Cluster offers multiple options including, full, incremental, and table-level backups. Incremental backups only transfer changed data, which significantly reduce backup times by avoiding the need to back up the full amount of historical data. Table-level backups occur at a logical object level, such as a table or a child table (also known as partitions in traditional databases), and enable fine-grained offline archival. These various options enable backup storage costs to be easily managed as data volumes grow. Finally, nCluster Online Backup also provides the ecosystem flexibility to store backup on a pre-existing networked storage system (SAN/NAS), if required by an organization’s IT policies.

"Our customers run extreme workloads on their data warehouses. We offer them ‘always on’ capabilities so they can do their jobs without disruption. And we help them do their jobs faster. Our unique offering gives customers a backup capability that is effortless, non-disruptive and highly scalable," said Mayank Bawa, CEO of Aster.