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I was at Dell EMC World2017 last week and although most of the news was on Dell’s new 14th generation server and Dell-EMC integration progress, Wednesday’s keynote was devoted to storage and non-server infrastructure news.
There was plenty of non-server news but one item that caught my attention was new functionality from Dell EMC Data Protection Division that used Avamar and Data Domain to provide disaster recovery for VMware VMs directly to AWS.
Data Domain (AWS) Cloud DR
Dell EMC Data Domain Cloud DR (DDCDR) is a new capability that enables DD to backup to AWS S3 object storage and when needed restart the virtual machines within AWS.
DDCDR requires that a customer with Avamar backup and Data Domain (DD) storage install an OVA which deploys an “add-on” to their on-prem Avamar/DD system and install a lightweight VM (Cloud DR server) utility in their AWS domain.
Once the OVA is installed, it will read the changed data and will segment, encrypt, and compress the backup data and then send this and the backup metadata to AWS S3 objects. Avamar/DD policies can be established to control how many daily backup copies are to be saved to S3 object storage. There’s no need for Data Domain or Avamar to run in AWS.
When there’s a problem at the primary data center, an admin can click on a Avamar GUI button and have the Cloud DR server, uncompress, decrypt, rehydrate and restore the backup data into EBS volumes, translate the VMware VM image to an AMI image and then restarts the AMI on an AWS virtual server (EC2) with its data on EBS volume storage. The Cloud DR server will use the backup metadata to select the AWS EC2 instance with the proper CPU and RAM needed to run the application. Once this completes, the VM is running standalone, in an AWS EC2 instance. Presumably, you have to have EC2 and EBS storage volumes resources available under your AWS domain to be able to install the application and restore its data.
For simplicity purposes, the user can control almost all of the required functionality for DDCDR from the Avamar GUI alone. But in case of a site outage, the user can initiate the application DR from a portal supplied by the Cloud DR server utility.
There you have it, simplified, easy to use (AWS) Cloud DR for your VM applications all through Dell EMC Avamar, Data Domain storage and DDCDR. At the moment, it only works with AWS cloud but it’s likely to be available for other public clouds in the near future.
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There was much more infrastructure news at Dell EMC World2017. I’ll discuss more details on their new storage offerings in my upcoming Storage Intelligence newsletter, due out the end of this month. If your interested in receiving your own copy of my newsletter, checkout the signup button in the upper right of this page.
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[Edits were made for readability and technical accuracy after this post was published. Ed]
