View our Backup to the Cloud presentation from AWS re:Invent 2013.

1. STG 201 – Backup To The Cloud
Travis Greenstreet, 2nd Watch
November 13, 2013
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified, or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

2. Agenda
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Backups - Traditional vs. Cloud
AWS Backup, Archival & DR Tools
DR – Traditional vs. AWS Solutions
HA Using AWS Solutions
Q&A

3. What’s wrong with Traditional Backups
• Long/slow recovery time
• Low durability (higher probability for data loss)

4. What’s wrong with Traditional Backups
• Requires Tape Museums
• Expensive Tech Refresh
• Disaster Recovery
– Complex and highly cost-prohibitive

5. What makes AWS better than Traditional
Solutions?
• Eleven 9s (that’s 99.999999999%) of durability
(S3/Glacier)
• Seamless integration with existing AWS
infrastructure
• Lifecycle Management built in via “Lifecycle
Policies”

6. What makes AWS better than Traditional
Solutions?
• Numerous options for transferring data in/out
and syncing
• The typical reasons for using AWS apply (e.g.
Reduce CapEx, Reduce TCO, industry
compliances)
• Affordable and manageable DR with “Pilot Light”

7. AWS Backup, Archival, and DR tools
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S3 (backup/recovery)
Glacier (archival)
EBS snapshots
AWS Import/Export (used for seeding large data
sets)

8. AWS Backup, Archival, and DR tools
• Storage Gateway
• Pilot Light (Disaster Recovery)
• Warm Standby (taking Pilot Light a step further
to achieve fault tolerance between on premise
and AWS DR resources)

9. Amazon S3 – Simple Storage Service
• Durable and low cost (1GB < $0.10 per month)
• Unlimited number of objects and volume
• Backup from any system directly to S3 buckets
via HTTP/HTTPS
– Create scripts using PowerShell, Perl, Python…
– Numerous solutions for data copy and synch

10. Amazon S3 – Simple Storage Service
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Easily create lifecycle rules
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Delete or archive to Glacier
Single rule for the bucket or multiple based on object prefix
Security
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Control access thru policies and ACLs
Auditable access
Encryption in flight and at rest (SSL & SSE)
Versioning in case of accidental
deletion

11. Amazon Glacier – Infinite Archival
Storage
• Secure and cost
effective offsite data
archiving
• Excellent for logs
• Long term preservation
for potential future
analytic sources

12. EBS Snapshots
 “SAN like snapshots” of EBS storage allow
recovery to a point in time – replicated across
the entire region (3+ AZ/datacenters)
 Auto-scaling and scripting allow backup server
to be fully cost optimized
Example: 2W Backup Server < $1 per month

13. AWS Import/Export
• Quickly migrate large amounts of data in/out of
AWS
– Seeding initial datasets
– Copying offsite backups into S3, EBS, Glacier
– Retrieval of offsite backups and datasets

14. High Availability on AWS
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Plan for failure at any level
Services within a Datacenter (AZs) can fail
Regions are N+2 (minimum)
Reserve capacity (the other side of Reserved Instances)
Use AWS Services that scale across AZs
− VPC, S3, ELB, RDS, ...

15. HA Example
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HA at each tier
Can lose entire
datacenter and
maintain
production load
Auto-scaling at
web and API tier
to support
dynamic site load
EBS Snapshots
replicated to
additional
region(s)

16. Disaster Recovery
• Average fully managed costs of DR > $1 per GB
of protected data
• Recovering from backups can take days
• Backup tapes add risk and time to recovery
– Do you have all the tapes you need
– Are the resources available to do the restorations

17. Disaster Recovery on AWS
Classes of RTO’s
• Critical – Real-time
availability or near real-time
(minutes) – Tier 0
infrastructure, critical apps
• Major – Applications to run
the business (hours) – Tier
1 infrastructure and apps
• Minor – Applications that
can withstand a longer
downtime (hours - days)
AWS Solution
• High Availability or Warm
Standby
• Pilot Light DR in AWS
• Backup and Recovery in
AWS

20. Advantages of a Pilot Light DR Scenario
• Warm standby for the price of cold storage
o Or Less!
• Super fast recovery time
o Entire recovery process could be 1-3 hours
• Data replication can keep critical systems in sync
Tip: include full domain controller to ensure all
accounts are replicated and can be used at time of
event for definitive source.

21. Storage Gateway – Cached or Stored
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Gateway-Cached
Frequently accessed data
is cached on premise
Cost savings on storage
Mount volumes up to
32TB
With up to 150 TBs total
storage
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Gateway-Stored
Low-latency access to all
your data
Asynchronous backup to
S3 as EBS Snapshots
Mount volumes up to 1TB
Up to 12TBs of total
storage

22. Storage Gateway – VTL
• Enterprise cloud backup solution
• All the benefits of S3 and Glacier, in an easy to
use package
• No need for re-architecting your datacenter, no
need for re-training your employees

23. Storage Gateway – VTL
• Works with your existing backup software
• Traditional tape durability is 90%, VTL achieves
99.999999999%
• Pay for what you use. If you store 1GB on a
100GB virtual tape, you’ll only pay for the 1GB

24. Virtual Tape Library
• Create tapes using the AWS Console or
programmatically with the Storage Gateway API
• Each gateway can contain up to 1500 tapes,
with up to 150TB of data
• S3 provides hyper durability, your backup
software and Storage Gateway VTL do the rest

25. Virtual Tape Shelf
• Iron Mountain for the 21st century
• Tapes moved to the Virtual Tape Shelf are stored
in Glacier
• Extremely cost effective. You’ll pay 1 penny per
gigabyte, per month. Archive 5 GB of data for
less than $1 per year.

26. Watch that VTL
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Leverage the existing
capabilities of CloudWatch to
monitor and alarm your backup
processes.
Automatically send notifications
to engineers when a backup
process has exceeded a
specified threshold.
Examine weeks worth of data to
identify patterns of behavior, all
through a familiar interface.
Trigger API calls based on
backup activity.

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STG201 – Backup To The Cloud
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