Monthly Archives: February 2019

Using the Cloud for Disaster Recovery

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One of the common use cases for using the cloud, especially for companies with large on-prem data centers, is Disaster Recovery (DR).  Instead of building or continuing to maintain an expensive on-prem DR site, the cloud can provide a cheaper alternative for replicating and protecting your data.

There are many products and services out there for DR in the cloud.  If your company is using EMC devices – specifically Avamar and Data Domain (DD) – for data protection, you can replicate your virtual machines (VM) backup to AWS and be able to perform disaster recovery of your servers in AWS.  This solution is called Data Domain Cloud DR (DDCDR) and  it enables DD to backup to AWS S3 object storage. Data is sent securely and efficiently, requiring minimal compute cycles and footprint within AWS. In the event of a disaster, VM images can be restored and run from within AWS. Since neither Data Protection Suite nor DD are required in the cloud, compute cycles are only required in the event of a restore.

Backup Process

  • DDCDR requires that a customer with Avamar backup and Data Domain (DD) storage install an OVA which deploys an “add-on” to their on-prem Avamar/DD system and install a lightweight VM (Cloud DR server) utility in their AWS domain.
  • Once the OVA is installed, it will read the changed data and will segment, encrypt, and compress the backup data and then send this and the backup metadata to AWS S3 object storage.
  • Avamar/DD policies can be established to control how many daily backup copies are to be saved to S3 object storage. There’s no need for Data Domain or Avamar to run in AWS.

Restore Process

  • When there’s a problem at the primary data center, an admin can click on a Avamar GUI button and have the Cloud DR server uncompress, decrypt, rehydrate and restore the backup data into EBS volumes, translate the VMware VM image to an AMI image, and then restarts the AMI on an AWS virtual server (EC2) with its data on EBS volume storage.
  • The Cloud DR server will use the backup metadata to select the AWS EC2 instance with the proper CPU and RAM needed to run the application. Once this completes, the VM is running standalone, in an AWS EC2 instance. Presumably, you have to have EC2 and EBS storage volumes resources available under your AWS domain to be able to install the application and restore its data.

Source: https://www.dellemc.com/