Joe Noonan, Senior Product Manager at PHD Virtual is now posting up a “Tip of the Week” on the PHD Virtual Forums!
This week’s tip went up today and Joe posted three really awesome ways that you can use PHD Virtual Backup to better leverage cloud storage!]
Replicating PHD Backups to the Cloud
This is one of the most popular use cases for cloud storage. Users back up locally and then have those backups replicated to the cloud. In this situation, the cloud is an alternative to tape for off-site backup copies.
There are a couple ways this can be achieved:
1. There are some great cloud gateway solutions that run as physical or virtual appliances, such as TwinStrata and Riverbed, which can be set up as a local target in your data center for PHD backups. These solutions can then efficiently deduplicate, encrypt, and replicate data directly to cloud providers. A lot of these solutions integrate with the REST APIs of those providers for additional optimizations.
NOTE: Ensure that you check with any of these providers when it comes to supporting specific backup vendors. With PHD, you would generally leverage our Full / Incremental backup mode when using these solutions as a target.
2. You can set up a VM with a lot of storage as a share in the cloud. Then you can leverage rsync or other free replication software to replicate between your local PHD backups and that share.
3. Using the PHD Exporter. For small amounts of data, users can leverage the PHD Exporter to schedule OVF files to be pulled off to staging storage. Then users can move the OVFs periodically off to cloud storage using the interfaces provided by cloud vendors. This might be a bit manual, but one of the cool benefits is that the OVFs can actually be restored in the cloud because of their open format.
Just make sure you import them into the same hypervisor from which the backups were taken.
Replicating VMs to Cloud Infrastructure
This one gets a little tricky. It is very dependent on the provider. In order to efficiently replicate VMs from local backups to cloud infrastructure, you’ll need a VBA in the cloud infrastructure that has hypervisor access and permissions to allow for replication. This is not something you normally get from providers like Amazon, which is why the PHD Exporter option above was nice. Rackspace is an example of a provider that will allow you to rent physical infrastructure that you can set up with a hypervisor and a VBA to do VM replication to the cloud.
Please let me know if it would be interesting to you if PHD provided a list of providers that already use PHD Virtual in their cloud infrastructure that could assist with a use case like this.
Backing Up Directly to the Cloud
Since a VBA only needs access to a share in order to do backups, you can simply set up a VBA that points to a share that lives in the cloud – as noted above you can simply rent a VM with storage and present it as a CIFS or NFS share to us. You could then schedule a job that backs up directly to that share. Please remember to use our Full / Incremental mode in this scenario. You will likely get much better performance over the WAN, although mileage will always vary.
In some cases, it might be best to have a VBA backing up locally, and then have a second job doing the off-site backup so that you still have the local copy for fast restores.
If you wanted to restore to cloud infrastructure from the backups living on cloud storage, you would need to ensure that you could rent the infrastructure and have VBAs with hypervisor access running in the cloud infrastructure so that you could restore in the cloud.
Great post Joe!
The full post can be found here also: http://forums.phdvirtual.com/forums?func=view&id=5422&catid=23