In this blog post, I would like to recap the many ways our solutions support Amazon AWS. With our most recent release, UDP 6.5, we have added new options for customers who are trying to optimize their AWS consumption and costs.
Quick reminder: in UDP, a recovery point is effectively the backup of your environment – it’s the data, the operating systems, the applications, the VMs etc. With a recovery point you can recover anything from a single email to a full system (including bare metal recovery to dissimilar hardware)
UDP S3 support
With UDP you can now copy a full recovery point into S3.
- This is a great solution for archival or long term retention. And you have everything you need for a complete recovery. You can also decide to only send files and folders, a feature we’ve had for a long time.
- The recovery point copy could be used as a means to move away from tape. We believe this will be a use case our customers will leverage.
- No Arcserve software is required and therefore there is no compute cost.
Snowball device support
Stay tuned as we are finalizing our tests to leverage this seed device than can be used to transfer Recovery Points or transfer Recovery Points back to your site for restore/recovery.
Boot EC2 VM from bootable recovery point
If you use EC2, you now have the option of using a UDP Proxy which effectively allows you to launch virtual machines in EC that are based off of our bootable recovery points, meaning you literally get a Disaster Recovery service with limited compute costs. Once the VMs are running, you can access the systems you have protected, and run them if you want. Just like you would on premise. You can also select multiple versions depending on how many recovery points you have.
UDP with RPS/Console running in EC2
Since the inception of UDP we have supported the ability to run it in EC2, specifically the Recovery Point Server and the Console. In this case, and unlike the use of the UDP proxy, compute is needed as data protection workflows are processed between the primary site(s) and EC2.
By using UDP 6.5 running in EC2 in this fashion, customers can replicate from their primary with an enterprise-class solution that is not only WAN-optimized, but also brings in global source side deduplication (therefore less storage is required!), and a full set of features that optimize data transfers as they effectively provide the ability to only capture incremental changes and to modulate retention policies between sites. For example, the AWS destination RPS could have a longer retention policy in order to optimize the primary (on premise) site.
Protect EC2 VMs: With this capability, users can also protect of EC2 Virtual Machines with an agent inside the EC2 VMs.
Protect Office 365: In addition, with UDP 6.5 customers can now also protect their Office 365 (Exchange today) in EC2, adding to the breadth of platform support UDP already covers.
Bring workloads back Home: Finally it is also possible to replicate from EC2 back “home”, to an on-premise RPS which is a great capability to get a Disaster Recovery copy of cloud workloads while still benefitting from the optimization and management features of UDP.
High Availability and Continuous Data Replication
Yes, we do that too! The Arcserve UDP Premium Plus edition comes with our High Availability module. This solution provides Full System HA of Windows machines to the AWS EC2 cloud. This allows our customers to not only protect their local site with continuous replication into EC2, but to also failover with multiple bootable copies that can be powered on instantly in case disaster at the source site. The solution can also be used for failback to on-premises using bare metal restore. In this case, compute is needed to run the RHA engine in EC2.
In addition, our high availability module can also protect EC2 instances with continuous replication (it requires an agent inside EC2 instances).
UDP Tape Module VTL Gateway
Our tape capability in UDP also allows to leverage the Amazon VTL Gateway. In this scenario, UDP 6.5 (or Arcserve Backup v17.5) will treat it like any other physical tape library. Backups from all agents can be written to this Virtual Tape Library. The Amazon Gateway manages the backups on the Amazon side.
Arcserve Backup Customers
Arcserve Backup customers can, without any Arcserve Software in AWS, send backups of any agent to S3. This is really a scenario that would typically be used to send second copy of backup to S3 or leverage the VTL Gateway.
As you can see our backup and Disaster recovery solution set for AWS is very rich and complete. If your data protection and IT cloud strategy leverages AWS, please give us a call!
