3 Application Architectures for Successful Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

Over the past few years, we’ve written several blog posts about various disaster recovery methods for your applications running atop of Cloud-A’s infrastructure. If you take a look at these various articles, which highlight software and tools to help you achieve your disaster recovery requirements, you’ll notice that there there is more than one way to skin this cat.

The method you use to backup and recover your applications and data should vary depending on the technical requirements of a given application and/or data store and your organization’s tolerance for downtime for that app or data store.

Let’s dig into three conceptual models for disaster recovery on Cloud-A. We’ve ranked these methods 1-5 by data resiliency, time to recover and cost.

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Automatic Server Backups to Cloud-A Bulk Storage

If you’re looking for a cost effective, Canadian backup solution for your Windows desktops and servers, look no further! Our Bulk Storage service is an ultra-reliable, low-cost, and 100% Canadian hosted object storage service. When teamed with CloudBerry Labs’ Backup software, it allows administrators to easily backup their systems.

CloudBerry offers two types of backup products: CloudBerry Backup and CloudBerry Managed Backup. Today we’re going to be using their basic Backup product, however many of the settings we’re going to be going over will translate over to the managed product as well.

Install CloudBerry Backup

To get started, visit https://www.cloudberrylab.com/solutions/clouda and download the Backup software onto the machine you wish to backup. Once the download has completed, you may be asked to install Microsoft Visual C++. You should go ahead and do so. Once that has been downloaded and installed, you’ll need to re-run the CloudBerry Backup setup.


Once setup is complete, click on the Finish button and CloudBerry Backup will launch. Initially, you’ll be asked if you would like to use the free trial or activate a paid license. If you have paid for CloudBerry already, go ahead and input your license information. Otherwise, you can continue with the free trial for now. Once you’ve completed that step, the CloudBerry app will open and you’ll be able to start setting everything up.

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WordPress Backups for Beginners and Advanced Users

Backup MemeWe all know that backing up data is important. Whether it’s a corporate Windows file server, or our treasured family photos, we make sure that we can recover our data in the case of a hardware failure. Oddly enough, most folks tend to skip over their website data when considering their backup strategy.

Although WordPress is the most used CMS in the world, many users still struggle to find a good backup solution. Thankfully, using a combination of Cloud-A’s Bulk Storage and the popular Updraft Plus WordPress Backups plugin, automatically backing up and restoring your website is extremely easy and cost effective. This makes it an ideal solution for WordPress users of any skill level.

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Cloud Object Storage Survey

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Hello Bulk Storage users! Our partner CloudBerry Lab is offering a free license of their CloudBerry Explorer PRO to any Cloud-A Bulk Storage user who fills out the 9 questions in the link below. Please note that this data will be shared with CloudBerry Lab for market research purposes, so take this into consideration prior to submitting your responses.

We will be submitting responses to CloudBerry Lab at the end of everyday and they will be sending out the licenses to your email address.

This offer expires October 27th, 2015

Take the Survey!

 

Cloud-A Backup Methods

At Cloud-A, we have opted to allow our users to design their own backup strategies for their Cloud-A VMs, using whatever backup solution our users are comfortable with, since backups are not a one-size fits all solution. Application servers, database servers and file servers all have different uptime requirements, durability, and loss acceptance. With that said, we quite often get asked what backup software we see used most often on our Cloud through interactions with our users. Here is a list of backup software tried and tested by our users to help you decide on the best backup strategy for your Cloud-A stacks.

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Bulk Storage Auth for CloudBerry Products

There are now two ways to authenticate your Cloud-A Bulk Storage account to CloudBerry products based on your workflows and requirements. The first method is Keystone authentication, which is the legacy method. Authenticating this way. Untitled design (19)The Cloud-A, CloudBerry Lab partnership has been great for our clients, providing a tried and tested use-case for backups of on-premise or Cloud-A hosted Windows servers (and soon to be Linux!)

You will notice a few changes in the Cloud-A/CloudBerry relationship. First of all, most CloudBerry OpenStack products now have a branded connector for Cloud-A. No longer will you have to choose the generic OpenStack account.

There are now two ways to authenticate your Cloud-A Bulk Storage account to CloudBerry products based on your workflows and requirements. The first method is Keystone authentication, which is the legacy method. Authenticating this way will allow for read and write access to all of the Bulk Storage containers in your Cloud-A Account.

With the release of Bulk Storage container keys, users can now authenticate to specific containers, rather than all of the containers in your account. Authenticating this way is ideal for service providers who manage backups for multiple customers. Instead of authenticating to the service provider’s Bulk Storage account where you would have access to all of the account’s containers, you authenticate to a specific client’s container.

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Store Veeam Backups on Cloud-A with CloudBerry Backup

veeam (1)Veeam is a popular enterprise backup solution for on-premise virtualized infrastructure, specifically for vSphere and Hyper-V environments. We often get users asking if they can point their Veeam backups directly to Cloud-A Bulk Storage, and while it is possible, it requires some additional software.

CloudBerry Backup can be used for backing up your Veeam backup data into Cloud-A Bulk Storage, which gives you an extra level of confidence that your important files are safe, offsite on 3X redundant storage. Here is how you can use CloudBerry Backup for backing up Veeam files to Cloud-A.

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Why Object Storage?

We have been seeing increasing demand for our object storage product, Bulk Storage over the past few months, which is exciting for us because we think that object storage is a phenomenal storage solution for many specific applications. We wanted to provide our followers with an overview of object storage technology and highlight some effective use cases. The biggest hurdle we see to adoption of our Bulk Storage product is an understanding of how exactly the technology can be used. As a result of this, a big portion of our job at Cloud-A is to play matchmaker and point users in the direction of existing third party software solutions that integrate with object storage.

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Disaster Recovery For Those Concerned About DR In The Cloud

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Although there are some who would say the cloud is redundant to the point that you don’t need to consider a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) for it, many of our clients are more comfortable because we offer them a simple and easy ways to protect themselves in this regard. This approach is relatively unique in that we ensure our clients data is always easily accessible to them as a result of our commitment to design to avoid client data lock-in.

Almost all of our customers at Cloud-A have the need to manage backups, archival and disaster recovery data in a variety of different ways. This speaks to the diverse nature of our customers who span a wide array of industries including healthcare, financial services, higher education as well as the government sector. Each customer has their own internal requirements for data protection in addition to the requirements of their clients, and relevant governing bodies. Some customers combine file level backup solutions with periodic snapshots so that they have point-in-time instances of their systems to recover to. Here are some of the more popular backup solutions we’ve seen deployed on Cloud-A so far:

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Video Tutorial: Using Cloudberry Explorer with Cloud-A Bulk Storage

A couple of months ago we posted about CloudBerry explorer and some basics on how to set it up with Cloud-A Bulk Storage. Since then we have announced our partnership with CloudBerry after months of rigorous testing to ensure that CloudBerry’s OpenStack products integrate seamlessly with our Bulk Storage.

Check out our latest video tutorial on how to use CloudBerry Explorer with Cloud-A Bulk Storage. This solution provides a very simple interface for your Bulk Storage containers, allowing even non-technical end users to copy and move files from their local systems to the cloud.