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Protect your Hybrid Cloud

Migrate, Protect and Recover: AWS Outpost & Microsoft Azure Stack

Written on: Mar 8, 2021 2:54:17 PM

Written by: Alex Raben

Topic

[Data Management, COOLSPIRiT]

At the end of 2020 and through 2021, our team have experienced a significant increase in requests for solutions to protect either AWS Outpost, Microsoft Azure Stack or both together. 

This doesn't come as a surprise though, as according to research, over 58% of enterprises' workloads are now on hybrid cloud (1) and constantly increasing.

It is very easily understood why both of these technologies are being embraced by so many enterprises. With AWS Outposts allowing organisations to run AWS infrastructure and services on-premises for a truly consistent hybrid experience and Azure Stack offering an extension of Azure to consistently build and run hybrid applications across data centres, edge locations, remote offices, and cloud - there is no doubt in the power of these solutions to enable a truly hybrid experience.

When an organisation runs both technologies, our team introduce Commvault, which can cover both bases from its single management console. 

Continue reading to understand more on how Commvault helps organisations assure the protection of all their hybrid cloud data - from two members of the Commvault team.

AWS Outpost Protection

Since the first release of AWS Outposts in December 2019 adoption of on-premises AWS managed infrastructure has been growing in demand. AWS Outposts provides low-latency, on-premises infrastructure that is fully managed by Amazon. Organisations with high-performance compute needs or regulatory restrictions are seeking AWS Outposts to meet their unique requirements. Outpost provides localised EC2, EBS, RDS, EKS and more recently S3 services within Amazon managed racks. Commvault has supported the protection of AWS Outposts EC2 workloads since its initial release.

Challenges of migrating your applications to Outposts

AWS Outposts provides a fast path for adopting AWS services within business owned or operated facilities. The immediate challenge faced by many consumers is – “How do I get my applications into my Outposts?” And more importantly, once applications are running on the Outposts, “How do I perform backup and recovery for them?”.

The complexity of challenges faced depends on the current adoption of AWS services within the business. Challenges include:

  • How to migrate existing on-premises Virtual Machines (VMs) and applications to the Outpost.
  • How to migrate existing AWS workloads from an AWS region to the Outposts (or vice versa).
  • How to visualize, manage and report the recovery readiness of applications across Outposts and the region.

Migrating, Protecting, and Recovering your Outposts workloads

Commvault was recently named an AWS Outposts Service Ready partner, and solves these unique hybrid multi-cloud data management challenges today. Commvault and Amazon have validated backup and recovery, migration, and disaster recovery of AWS Outposts workloads (including Commvault infrastructure) as part of the service ready program.

Commvault helps accelerate and secure each step of the AWS Outposts journey by enabling:

  1. Migration – Commvault enables the migration of AWS EC2, EBS, RDS, and EKS workloads from the AWS region to the Outposts. Additionally, Commvault can migrate non-Amazon VMs (VMware, Hyper-V, Azure) and databases (MySQL, Postgres) and on-premise Kubernetes applications into and out of the Outposts.
  2. Protection – Commvault provides cloud-native backup and recovery of Outposts EC2, EBS, RDS and EKS workloads. This includes orchestrating snapshots and tiering backup data out to localized or remote Amazon S3 storage. Additionally, application-consistent protection for 50+ modern and traditional applications is supported. This provides ultimate flexibility in protecting your applications, wherever they reside.
  3. Recovery – Commvault provides in-place recovery of files, folders, applications, databases, or entire instances back to the Outposts. By providing the ability to recover to a new location or instance both on-premises or within any of the 24 geographic regions.

Backup data may be stored locally within an AWS Outposts S3 library, or stored remotely in the AWS region for protection from site-wide events or unplanned outages. In fact, multiple Outposts may also be combined to ensure high availability for on-premises protection activities.

Commvault orchestrates Amazon-native snapshots, and optionally tiers backup data to optimized Amazon S3, S3-IA, Glacier, and DeepArchive. Commvault storage tiering provides the ability to store long-term, regulatory backup and archive data at reduced cost (as opposed to traditional EBS snapshots).

Data management across an entire business rarely involves a single location or Amazon account. Commvault automates protection cross-region and even cross-account, ensuring secure separation of your production workloads and backup data. Built-in ransomware protection prevents access to backup data, and also monitors for anomalies across your data estate. Actionable alerts provide awareness and response if suspicious activity is identified. Some workloads demand and increased level of business continuity and Commvault provides one-button Disaster Recovery for Outpost workloads, ensuring site-wide recovery is automated and repeatable.

Credit: Mat Ericson, Commvault

Azure Stack HCI Protection

We are all looking for that one solution that saves us time, improves our efficiency, modernises our efforts, and saves us money. For those companies planning to consolidate virtualized workloads, replace legacy hardware, and integrate with Microsoft Azure for a complete hybrid cloud experience, Azure Stack HCI is for you. By including Commvault Data Management, Backup, and Recovery into their plans, organizations can ensure success.

If you have just configured a hyper-converged cluster and used Storage Spaces Direct to allocate flexible storage to your applications, your first questions might be how to ensure those virtual machines and data are protected from a failure, outage, or ransomware. Commvault is built for flexibility: it easily manages and backs up your VMs and restores them to the same host, Azure public cloud, or other locations.

Here are a few key features available with Commvault support for Azure Stack HCI:

  • Backup application-aware virtual machines
  • Easily restore guest files and folders, full virtual machines, or virtual machine disks
  • Convert VMs from a different virtualization platform like VMware with image-level conversion to Azure Stack HCI
  • Replicate VMs for disaster recovery with orchestration for failovers
  • Global deduplication, compression, and encryption

Microsoft has been putting a lot of focus on keeping the management of its services consistent by allowing administrators to use the Azure Portal as well as Windows Admin Center. Commvault is also providing this same consistency across its solution offerings by providing a single-pane-of-glass interface with the Commvault Command Center. Whether you are managing a group of virtual machines in the cloud, an Azure Stack Hub on-premises, or an Azure Stack HCI cluster—or any combination—it can all be protected and reported on from a single interface.

Credit: Lorne Oickle, Commvault

 

Preventing data loss begins with assessing your current backup, recovery, and retention products, procedures and policies. If you would like an expert opinion on the best technology to protect your critical data, then contact the COOLSPIRiT team today.

Alternatively, complete the details of your current systems and we will be one step ahead before we speak - use our quick and easy online quote request system today.

If you would prefer to talk simply call our expert team on 01246 454 222 or email hello@coolspirit.co.uk

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