Using AWS as a Recovery Site with NetBackup and Resiliency Platform

The allure of cloud storage as a backup target is a powerful one. And why wouldn’t it be? It’s an infinitely scalable, relatively low cost, always online, and removes all the “tapeiness” of your legacy off-site disaster recovery (DR) process. It can also dramatically reduce the high infrastructure, maintenance, and labor cost associated with a traditional hardware-heavy DR site. NetBackup has incorporated a number of great features to make AWS S3 storage a natural part of backup and recovery operations—Client Accelerator, compression, and end-to-end encryption—as well as the storage and bandwidth savings from highly efficient deduplication technology. But what if back up to S3 storage was just the beginning of a compelling story instead of the “end of the line”? Once the data is stored in AWS, why not tap into the rest of the platform’s potential and use AWS EC2 compute services as an on-demand recovery site?

NetBackup 8.3 extends the capability to back up from a data center to AWS S3 in a deduplicated format by adding the option of recovering that workload into an EC2 virtual machine (VM). That means you can recover your application without having to provision a new server in your data center. Or perhaps you just want to migrate a workload to AWS proactively. Because you’ve been sending backup data to the S3 storage platform, you’ve already done much of the necessary work. All you have to do is restore the workload to an EC2 VM, and your workload can be up and running with minimal effort.

What if the workloads that are running in your data center are hosted in VMs running on VMware and you want to migrate one over to be hosted in a native EC2 instance instead? Not a problem. NetBackup provides integration with the AWS platform to convert the application, formatting during the recovery process so it can run within a standard EC2 VM.

If you want to coordinate the migration of multiple workloads that have been backed up using NetBackup, or even an entire data center in the event of a disaster, the Veritas Resiliency Platform is available to orchestrate these activities so workload services are migrated and brought online with planned precision. Resiliency Platform can even coordinate the migration of workloads that span multiple VMs with critical interdependencies that must be re-created precisely and brought online in the correct sequence during a recovery. No more guesswork or panic during the recovery process—just precision and high confidence in your data center migration.

In addition to being able to orchestrate the migration or recovery of data that has been written to S3 from NetBackup, Resiliency Platform also provides the ability to manage fully available failover instances for tier-one workloads. Instant availability for critical workloads means there’s no need to perform a restore process; instead, it’s a simple failover event, where disruption to the business process is kept to an absolute minimum. By orchestrating recovery processes across backup data as well as online replicated data, Resiliency Platform ensures you can achieve the right levels of recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPOs and RTOs) based on the criticality of each application.

So if you’re thinking about using the cloud as part of a tape replacement strategy, that’s a great move. But as you do so, also consider the additional benefits you can attain by positioning AWS S3 storage as the starting point of your new, reimagined DR strategy rather than simply the “end of the line.”

To learn more about NetBackup cloud data protection, visit veritas.com/netbackupcloud.