Backup/Restore & Disaster Recovery

 

 

Backup, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery management all mitigate risk and protect data.  Backups safeguard against loss, corruption or accidental deletion of data.  Files can be restored from backups.  The restoration of a few files from backups is practical but it may take hours or days to restore a lot of data. Backups are taken at specific times and are best held off site. Restoration of backups will be undertaken as and when necessary.  The restore process should be tested on a regular basis to meet security requirements.  Disaster Recovery is the method of getting businesses and organisations technology back up and running when data is unavailable for a long period of time.

 

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Millennia BaaS – Backup as a Service

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All customer VMs are image copied daily, and the backups are then transmitted to an alternate site.  Only the changed data is backed up and sent each day, but the entire VM can be recovered to a few snapshot points. The amount of retention is decided by the customer, the longer the backups are retained the more storage space is used and therefore the cost will rise accordingly.  Extra cost is only determined by storage used, no other charges for a longer retention are made.

Any backups that leave the main storage are encrypted in transit and on the destination storage so that unauthorised access to the backed up data is prevented.  Being encrypted these backups can be easily removed by a simple deletion of the backup file without risk of the data being recovered from the media later.

Backups (and offsite replication) may either be via Nutanix snapshot and replication or by utilising a third-party backup product such as Veeam and will be dependent on requirements.

Millennia DRaaS – Disaster Recovery as a Service

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Disaster Recovery mitigates for the situation where there is such a significant loss of service to the main site that the service needs to be brought up at the secondary site in order to get the service back into working order.  Millennia makes the recommendation to fail over to the DR site based on the following criteria:

  • Scope of failure – a key component or the entire site is affected (for example a power outage)
  • Time to resolve / Time to Failover – if the time to resolve the problem is shorter than the time to failover the service, then less disruption occurs waiting for the resolution
  • Recovery Point Objective (RPO) / Recovery Time Objective (RTO) influences the decision based on potential for data loss as well as service outage

It should be noted that failing over a service has inherent risks in itself, servers have to be rebooted at the alternate site and depending on the RPO, the point in time at which data has been replicated successfully to the DR site, data still may be lost.  If the original fault was a network issue, then recovering the network connection would result in no loss of data and would, therefore, be preferable, even if it potentially meant a larger service outage.

If the RTO, the time allowed to recover the service under SLA, is longer than the expected time for a fix then there is less impact on the service to wait for a fix than failover.

These things need to be considered before a decision to failover is made. Millennia will consider all these parameters and liaise with the customer before taking any action, and always keep the customer informed of the progress of the issue. RPOs and RTOs are dependent not only on the agreed timescales with the customer, but the technology employed to perform the backup and recovery process.

If the offsite recovery is via recovering of backups only then, depending on the size of the backups to be recovered, the RTO can be considerable, and similarly backups tend to be taken only daily so the RPO can be up to 24 hours.

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Zerto DR Services

By combining continuous data protection, automated orchestration and enterprise class scalability in a single platform, Zerto Virtual Replication dramatically accelerates multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud adoption (requires VMware).

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Xi Leap – Nutanix to Nutanix

Millennia will be extending our services with Nutanix Xi Leap.

This allows the customer to either select Nutanix Xi Cloud or one of our DR clusters as a target.

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Hosted Nutanix DR Services

Your own Nutanix DR cluster hosted in the Millennia Cloud on a monthly rental basis.

Connect your onsite cluster to us for remote backup, disaster recovery, or cloud bursting workloads

The Millennia DRaaS offers various options to reduce the RPO to acceptable figures.

1: Snapshot replication which means a snapshot is taken of the system at regular times throughout the day and the changes since the last snapshot are replicated and merged into the offsite copy of the system.  The RPO is, therefore, directly related to the frequency of the snapshots, with some time allowable for latency of data transmission. RPOs for this tend to be no less than 15 minutes

2: Continuous replication where updates are constantly streamed offsite so that only data transmission latency is included in the RPO – in this case RPOs can be as little as a few seconds

3: Stretched cluster arrangement for near zero RTO/RPO requirements, whereby any data update that is performed at the primary site is synchronously applied to the secondary site, and at any point the sites can be flipped over and continue to work with little or no interruption to service.  This option allows for very high uptime requirements in excess of 99.99% to be achieved

Options 1 and 2 allow the updated VMs at the remote site to be booted almost immediately, giving an initial RTO of as little as 15 minutes (to allow the systems to start properly and key in with each other).  In practice, Millennia usually quote an RTO of 2 hours to allow for sanity checking of the system and make sure everything is working satisfactorily before letting users back on the system, particularly if it is used for heavy data updates.

All DR options can be tested at any point without interrupting the Live service – allowing confirmation of the DR ability.

Thinking about Disaster Recovery?

 

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