Reducing costs while maintaining a high level of data resiliency is a challenging task. The need to store data for backup, disaster recovery (DR), or compliance purposes means that multiple copies of your data are being stored within your environment.
Migrating backups stored on-prem on either tape or disk to Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows for increased flexibility in managing data through its lifecycle.
Leveraging this data lifecycle management strategy in conjunction with Veritas NetBackup‘s deduplication capabilities allows you to realize cost savings over managing your data on-premises.
Veritas is an AWS Storage Competency Partner that helps enterprises address information management challenges, including backup and recovery, business continuity, software-defined storage, and information governance.
Veritas on AWS Use Cases
There are a number of options for enterprise customers looking to leverage Veritas on AWS—from customers that run all of their infrastructure on-premises to those that are all-in on AWS, and everything in between.
Let’s explore the different customer footprints and use cases for leveraging Veritas on AWS.
100% On-Premises
Customers that are 100 percent on-premises are a good candidate for using any one of the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) storage tiers for DR and long-term retention.
This deployment model allows you to continue to use your data center for all day-to-day activities, but AWS becomes the home for all of the backup and archived data.
The footprint for the AWS services used is relatively light:
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for data processing and data storage catalogs.
Amazon S3 for data storage.
Backups are moved from on-premises to AWS in a variety of ways, including over AWS Direct Connect, over Amazon VPN, or over the internet. Depending on the amount of initial backup and archive data that needs to be migrated, the same connection is used or larger amount of data (100+ TB) are migrated with an AWS Snowball.
In addition, if you’re only looking to store your data on AWS without any accompanying infrastructure, Veritas NetBackup is integrated with AWS services at an API level and sends data directly from on-premises to S3 storage tiers without the need for any NetBackup components running in AWS.
This allows you to leverage S3 for storage without the additional overhead of additional AWS services.
Hybrid
Hybrid customers that split their infrastructure between on-premises data centers and AWS can leverage Veritas for backup and disaster recovery.
This deployment allows customers to not store their backup and archive data in S3, while also leveraging NetBackup resiliency to have a standby copy of the on-premises infrastructure available on AWS in the event of a data center failure or natural disaster.
This hybrid model also allows you to use AWS Outposts, running AWS infrastructure in your own data center. Veritas has been certified to run on AWS Outposts and has additional information on Application Availability for AWS Outpost Service.
100% on AWS
Customers that are running 100 percent on AWS are able to leverage Veritas InfoScale on AWS for backup and high availability (HA).
InfoScale provides seamless migration of critical applications like SAP, Oracle, and MSSQL from on-premises to AWS.
This deployment model provides enterprise-grade storage and backup solution by replicating these applications and their data across multiple AWS Availability Zones (AZs) ensuring high availability.
This is also a solution for customers looking to migrate all of their infrastructure to AWS from their current on-premises environment.
Cost Analysis
Veritas’ ability to deduplicate the data reduces costs, and customers have realized savings of more than 90 percent. One customer reduced their data footprint from 2 PB to 100 TB.
The total Cost of ownership (TCO) of data protection varies by customer. By leveraging NetBackup’s deduplication to reduce the amount of data stored, using S3’s multiple storage classes to develop a data lifecycle management, and removing the manual steps of existing backup, archival, and recovery processes, you can reduce your TCO while still adhering to data protection and auditory requirements.
Using Veritas on AWS, automating the backup and archival process is easier to do than when using tape archives. This is done by creating policies to automatically expire the data from the different S3 storage classes, as it’s no longer needed.
Data, even when stored in Glacier Deep Archive, is available in hours, something that’s very difficult to do when retrieving tape backups that are stored off-site. The data is durable and reliable because it is stored in multiple Availability Zones, unless explicitly set to be stored in only one AZ, to ensure it’s available when needed.
This is a feature of S3 that require multiple copies of the data to be stored in multiple data centers if you are doing the same thing in an on-premises environment.
Using S3 for data storage also means the manual process of moving tape backups to offsite storage, and retrieval of data, is no longer needed. Combined with the deduplication of data being stored in S3, this is something that’s not typically done with tape backups and means the amount of data being stored is reduced.
A high-level example of TCO savings is seen if we look at the cost of storing tape backups versus migrating your archive data to AWS.
Let’s say the cost of your 30TB LTO-8 tape for backup is $100 per tape; this breaks down to $3.33 per TB stored.
The same amount of data is roughly $4/TB per month when stored in Amazon S3 Glacier, but the cost goes down to $0.99/TB per month when the data is stored in Glacier Deep Archive.
One of the biggest factors when moving your Veritas data to AWS is the act of deduplicating the data to reduce the footprint. If you have 100TB of data in your data center that needs to be stored, backing up to tape costs $333.
If we take a conservative deduplication percentage of 90 percent, and we store the same data in S3 Glacier Deep Archive, the cost per month of storing the same data (10TB of deduplicated data) is only $9.90.
There will be additional ingress and egress costs of moving the data to AWS, but those costs are nominal in comparison to the additional costs of data center space, worker time and productivity, the off-site archive service itself, and tape library maintenance.
This also does not take into account the fact that tapes degrade over time and the ones being stored offsite need to be moved back onsite for restoration.
Conclusion
Having your data available when you need it, whether for day-to-day activities, recovering from a disaster, restoring a local data loss event, or for compliance purposes, is extremely important for companies of all sizes.
Veritas on AWS ensures your data is highly available and provides savings over storing data in your data center and/or managing the tape backup archival process.
To learn more about Veritas and its strong collaboration with AWS, go to https://www.veritas.com/partners/aws
At Virtech, we are on a mission to help our clients address their challenges. Call us today at +971 4 580 7555 or email us at office@virtech.ae.
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