Disaster Recovery For Those Concerned About DR In The Cloud

Dr-plan
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:

Each of the solutions above utilize Cloud-A’s popular bulk storage offering that provides a cost effective, 3x redundant backup medium. One thing that is often not well understood about this kind of new cloud technology is that since Cloud-A provides an open platform where we take care to ensure our customers never need to be worried about data lock-in, one simple functionality that we offer is the ability to download your snapshots (in addition to your data volumes) to your local network without any undue friction or delay. What some of our clients have told us is that this feature in effect provides an additional layer of disaster recovery; a kind of DR in case of a disaster scenario failure that provides an extra level of confidence for those with concerns about the cloud going poof!  You can think of it like a kind of “Cloud Backup” that provides the ability for you to:

  • Have a “cold image” stored on-premise (or at a remote location, conceivably even on an external hard drive that could be stored in a safe for example)
  • In the case it was needed the snapshot images that were put in cold storage could be reactivated on Cloud-A, an internal network, or on alternative infrastructure if desired.
  • We believe that by making it very simple for our clients to access their data (without the need for them to request access to it) we are delivering on our promise to be exceptional custodians of our clients data.

Snapshot Image FAQs

  1. What file format are Cloud-A snapshots ?
  2. qcow2 (.qcow2)
  3. Can I convert qcow2 images to other file formats ?
  4. Yes. There are many easy to use commands that will convert the qcow2 image into the file path of your choice.

Command to convert qcow2 to VDMK (VMware):

$ qemu-img convert -f qcow2 file.qcow2 -O vmdk file.vmdk

Command to convert VDMK (VMware) to qcow2:

$ qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow2 file.vmdk file.qcow2

  1. If I had local images that I wanted to deploy to Cloud-A can I upload my snapshot images from a local network or another cloud ?

A. Yes. You can upload your snapshot, through the “Upload a custom image” option in the dashboard when launching a new instance.