MongoDB Management Service integration with enterprise data storage solutions

Companies are in constant search for new technologies and tools to manage and operate on unstructured data in real time. MongoDB has emerged as the best suited No-SQL database to provide marketing activities with greater agility and scalability. Small and large organizations use MongoDB to create new kinds of applications, improve their user experience, cut down time-to-market and reduce costs. MongoDB is a general-purpose open source database management system.

In a recent report , Gartner identified MongoDB as the only "Challenger" in the magic quadrant of operatixonal databases, acknowledging its ability to meet to new business requirements as opposed to traditional solutions such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, etc.

As a matter of fact, thanks to its schema-free structure based on documents, MongoDB stands out as the ideal solution in several business areas, such as: - Big Data, - Internet of Things, - Semantic Analysis, - Document storage.

Additionally, the MongoDB team has developed the so-called MongoDB Management Service (MMS), a web service allowing for both on premises or cloud-based deployment which can be used to monitor and manage MongoDB infrastructures in real time.

The MMS service is undoubtedly a strategic tool for DBAs but, especially in enterprise environments, it also has a crucial importance for DevOps, developers and designers of the system used to monitor and analyze architecture performance. It also allows to fine-tune the system and provides tools for just-in-time recovery in both test and production environments. MMS integrates an area to define backup policies so as to allow companies of every size to configure the backup policies that best suite their needs in accordance with company data protection policies both in terms of frequency and retention of snapshots.

MMS is built upon two MongoDB database instances:
- MMS Application Database: this database is essential for the whole monitoring system to work, being in charge of receiving the time series holding values for the architecture performance metrics and storing the information needed for the web service (e.g. users, groups of monitoring resources, etc); - Backup Blockstore Database: this database handles all backup operations. An initial snapshot of each replica set is created in this database, and all subsequent snapshots are stored using data deduplication to reduce disk usage. Snapshots can be configured through web interface with frequency rates ranging from 6 to 24 hours with daily, weekly or monthly retention.

As MongoDB is getting used more and more frequently in enterprise environments and mission-critical projects, the need has emerged to integrate the database management system with existing centralized backup and data recovery solutions already used in companies, such as NetBackup by Symantec.

NetBackup is an enterprise-level suite for virtual machine backup and recovery on Windows, Linux and Unix platforms. NetBackup relies on a central server to manage and monitor both the media servers (accessing backup media) and their clients.

If you are interested in learning how to integrate the MongoDB Management Service with Symantec NetBackup or any other backup and recovery suite, download our white paper for free. Feel free to contact us with any questions if you need further information on this topic.