Cloud Recovery

Last week I spoke with Christian Perry, a reporter for Processor Magazine, regarding backup and recovery trends and processes. Some of the questions being asked were focused around how to identify  which data is critical for backing up which got me thinking. Why decide and spend countless hours doing a data analysis to determine which data is critcal to each department. Why not select it all? The best solution is not having to decide and just back up the entire server workload. Data isn’t the most critical component of the server workload anymore, just as important and often overlooked is the operating system, applications and configuration settings of the server in addition to the associated data. Attempting to prioritize and determine the value of each file folder is not an easy process and IT managers are now looking to “set and forget” workload backup solutions that capture all changes to a server workload and allow them to determine at recovery time what is important. It is better to have and not need then wish you had and don’t in these scenarios.

Then I started thinking what about those organizations that don’t have a disaster recovery facility to backup and archive too or those who can’t afford the hosting services to provide this type of facility.

Then I remembered an application that I was recently asked to test and write about called CloudBerry from cloudberrylab which is a consumer based backup application that allows you to create space on the Amazon S3 file share.  CloudBerry Explorer application is a freeware that makes managing Amazon S3 storage easier for online backup. The product itself was pretty intuitive and not difficult to set up but noticed the transfer time I noticed was longer than I expected which was likely due to my internet connection.

The CloudBerry application is in addition to the growing trend of online cloud backup products similar to Mozy, Carbonite and Zmanda. But many of the challenges for consumer based backup remain the same as more enterprise cloud backup and recovery products having to select which data is critical, calculating transfer rates and the ability to recover and restore the data appropriately.

After looking around many of the enterprise backup products on the market provide the ability to select which data you want to protect but it seems to me that it would be easier to not have to select and just protect the entire server or workstation so if you needed to recover just the OS, data or associated application you had the choice available as well as the entire workload.

Then I noticed via Twitter that Double-Take software released a full server cloud backup and recovery application note for Amazon EC2 cloud infrastructure.  For Double-Take this makes perfect sense as it seems that rather than configuring a VPN connection to a disaster recovery data center you just set it up to backup and run the full server workload in the Amazon EC2 infrastructure and recover when needed.

It will be interesting to see the progress and adoption of cloud backup and recovery strategies moving forward. The link to the Double-Take application note is below. You have to give up your contact information but this is the first time I have seen a company actually release a detailed step by step instructions for cloud backup and recovery.

Guidelines for Implementing Double-Take® Cloud Recovery using Amazon Web Services