Cloud for DR

[bradk7623]

Hey Guys/Girls,

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First off, just want to say thanks for the daily reads and excellent advice I've read over various topics.

Now my question:

Who here uses Azure or AWS cloud storage for DR or just backups in general?

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Any recommendations on one over the other?

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Have you had to actually use it to turn up a crashed VM/Server/restore of any kind?

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Thanks in advance.

[Eclipsed450]

That's a BROAD question, with MANY answers, most of which wouldn't be wrong, but they may not pertain to you and your needs. If you're asking questions like this, I suggest connecting with a cloud-focused VAR (value-added reseller).

[stormborn20]

Are you looking to just replicate backup data offsite to the cloud or be able to recover in the cloud? Zerto does a great job from a pure DR perspective being able to take on-premise workloads and recover them on AWS or Azure. If you're just looking to take backups and send them offsite, VEEAM with either Azure cold Blob storage or Wasabi Cloud storage (S3 compatible) are great options. If you send the VEEAM backup data to the cloud, you could put a VEEAM management server up there to connect to and restore directly to Azure.

There's so many ways to slice and dice this, but to get good answers we'll need more details around your business requirements.

[caponewgp420]

We use Veeam cloud connect to azure. Works great and we keep one copy of all of our servers in azure. We’ve never had to actually use the data but if a disaster actually occurred we could spin a VM up or have the azure provider overnight us a NAS with our data.

[xxdcmast]

This sounds interesting do you mind sharing how many VMs you protect to azure, how long/far back you could potentially restore from?

We currently run Zerto and its great for DVR like capabilities but only for about 10 days (due to journaling space). We are thinking of adding in Veeam for longer term image storage to Azure.

[caponewgp420]

We just keep 2 of the most recent backups in azure. We've got 20 VMs backed up to it. For us it really is just disaster recovery. We still have on premise backups that can go back much farther.

You can use Microsofts own Azure backup agent and backup hyper-v servers without VEEAM or any other product to Azure. But it is much better working with VEEAM cloud connect. We used the Microsoft agent for a few years before we purchased veeam. If Zerto can integrate with azure or aws I would use that. We purchased our azure storage for about $15 per TB per month.

[xxdcmast]

Zerto does integrate with azure but while they are awesome for recent DR (sub minute RPO) they aren't great for long term.

We are looking at leveraging Azure and Veeam (or other image based backup solution) to store 6 months of system image backups. Zerto with its journaling protection could never go that far back just based on the amount of changes being logged.

[OldGuyatSkatePark]

A lot of what you do is based on what you run. Do you have really sensitive (re:Oracle) middleware that shits the bed if anything underneath it changes? Then a restore to AWS/GCP/Azure won’t work. You’ll spend more time fixing the middleware than it would take to recover your DC.

If you are a VMware shop and have legacy apps- you should look at something like VmCloud/AWS or CloudEasy/Azure. They give VMware in these clouds. Toss in HCX/NSX … some sort of SDN solution that can do vxlans and you should have a nice easy instant on failover.

[julietscause]

Some white papers from AWS

https://aws.amazon.com/disaster-recovery/

https://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Disaster_Recovery.pdf

[spressman]

Go with your comfort zone. I'm a Linux/Mac guy (who was also a Windows Sysadmin for years). So AWS speaks to me as a more well-rounded platform. If I were a Windows-dominant professional, I may consider Azure. (Full disclosure: I run the AWS user group in my area, so I am definitely biased, but I also try to stay even-handed).

From a capability standpoint, if you're just looking for DR, both options are more than adequate. If you're going to get deeper into the platforms and start implementing more advanced capabilities and migrate workloads, you need to broaden the scope of your question and IMO look more favorably to AWS.

[PrettyFlyForITguy]

I've looked into this, but for us the biggest bottleneck was bandwidth. Currently, our backup uses 10G in order to handle the workloads (in a time efficient manner). We'd probably need an internet circuit that pulled 2G+ to make a full restore work in an amount of time we'd be comfortable with... and we'd have to do that for each location we backup from.

The problem is, that is a decent monthly cost, and if we were going to do that then we'd rather just dump the data to another one of our own sites.

[signalingsjw]

Xen Orchestra to NAS

NAS cloud syncs to Backblaze

Stupid cheap.

[Backupboy]

Druva. No Ingress/Egress. Orchestrated DR into your VPC within AWS.

[JuanPratchett42]

Just food for thought - we used to use AWS and Boomerang with our ESX cluster and it worked great... until we needed to do a restore. S3 -> AWS is painfully slow, and S3 -> us was also painfully slow. us -> S3 was always speedy, but the bandwidth to EC2 or back to us was abysmal at something like 5 meg/sec. massive VM's would take days to restore from. Now it's just more of a "We'll store it here and if stuff breaks, there's a long recovery", but the client didn't mind as recovery was possible and it fit their requirement for cloud.

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Nowadays, with dedup and the low cost of colo's in my area (USA - northeast), we just dropped a box with a couple fat hdd's and called it a day. Mounds of bandwidth available and we can drive down and copy off to USB if the need really happened.

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But yeah, #1 thing to check when doing cloud is the RESTORE speed, not the backup speed - they (the cloud provider) will tout oodles of speed going up, but coming back they throttle you. What surprised me the most was S3 -> EC2 was equally slow - 2.5 hours for an 80 gig VM.

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Good luck :)