Backup

One thing that is sometimes overlooked in ‘cloud’ is backup. People assume that because their infrastructure isn’t in their datacenter anymore that disks won’t fail, users won’t delete the wrong file or DB corruptions won’t occur. Sometimes you will get away with it, but I sleep better at night knowing that my systems are being backed up on a nightly basis.

So how does Softlayer handle this critical operation?

Softlayer provides two ‘traditional’ OS level backup products. eVault and Idera (or R1Soft Backup). each product has its place in an IaaS solution.

eVault is as close to a ‘managed’ backup solution as Softlayer provides. The server and storage are looked after by Softlayer, you simply access the eVault portal and schedule your backups.

For the backup nerds out there (myself included) here is a bit of an overview of eVaults capabilities within softlayer:

• Backup to SAN (local or remote POD)
• Exclusively managed through web GUI based interface for backups and restores.
• Hourly, daily, weekly, and custom schedules that do incremental backups
• Full systems, specific directories or even individual files are backed up.
• eVault does come with a number of backup agents
  • MS Exchange
    Provides backup and restore for entire MS Exchange databases. Alternatively you may want to individually configure your backup (e.g. Define folders or mailboxes)
  • MS SQL Server
    Backup and save your SQL Server and transaction log.
  • MS SharePoint
    Backup your entire portal, a single or multiple location collections or single documents.
  • MS Clusters
  • Oracle servers
    Provides online backup capabilities for Oracle databases.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when considering eVault backup:

• eVault is ordered on a Per-Server Basis
• Additional agents have to be requested via ticket in the SL web portal
• You cannot backup VMs on a Self-Managed hypervisor
• There is no Agent for DB2
• You cannot backup Quantastor

Idera (under R1Soft in the SL portal) is a more traditional Server-Agent backup solution, Idera is a single tenant, self managed solution. Depending on the size of your environment, it may become far more economical to run an Idera server than it would be to use eVault.

So what can Idera do vs. eVault?

• Incremental block based backup
• AES-256 Disk Safe Encryption
• Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)
• Control panel integration (cPanel, Plesk, InterWorx and more)
• Onsite or offsite backup with tapeless multi-point replication
• Disk safe verification make restore tests obsolete
• Increments are kept based on number of restore points to keep (e.g. daily, monthly, etc.)
• Disk saves are portable, so a “backup” can be moved across locations
• Protects data at the block level and unique disk blocks on the server are stored only once across all recovery points increasing storage efficiency and reduces backup windows from hours to minutes
• Bare Metal Restore and Disaster Recovery
• Easy-to-use, Web-based interface
• Multi-platform support for physical and virtual servers
• Maximum data protection for MySQL databases

Idera does come with backup agents:

• bare-metal restores
• Databases (MS SQL, MySQL, MS Exchange)
• VSS

*Idera does not have an Oracle or DB2 agent

Idera can also backup data from VMs deployed on self managed hypervisors

• KVM
• VMWare
• Citrix
• Hyper-V
• Virtuozzo

So what makes up an Idera environment?

The Idera server, Softlayer and Idera recommend a Bare metal server with these minimum specs:

64 bit OS Windows / Linux
8GB RAM
Bottleneck is the disk I/O – Recommend backup target disk either Internal SSD or Softlayer SAN
Idera server need to have public & private interface

More detail:   http://wiki.r1soft.com/display/ServerBackup/Server+Backup+Manager+System+Requirements

The idera agent, Installed on the client (or backup target)
Supported Operating Systems:

• CentOS
• Debian
• Red Hat
• Ubuntu
• Windows Server 2008 (64-bit) and Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit)
• Windows Server 2012 (64-bit)

A couple of things to keep in mind when considering Idera

• Idera cannot backup to Object Storage natively*
• Oracle and DB2 Online backup
• Data Deduplication (Idera claim that this is unnecessary due to their incredibly advanced block based backup technologies)

*I will write another blog on hacking object storage into a filesystem, therefore, a potential backup target

So how do you choose between the two? I break it down to a couple of single points

• Price – Which is cheaper (don’t forget there is a time cost associated with managing Idera)
• Single/Multi Tenant – eVault is multi Tenant / Idera is single
• Control – How much control do you want over your backup environment? Idera will give you a lot more control
• DR – eVault does have limited DR capabilities and is more of a backup only solution

So what do you do if you don’t like these solutions? Or you love TSM? Upload your own application and run it yourself! Softlayer does not have any restrictions on implementing TSM, Veeam, Netbackup etc. There is an incredibly powerful network at your disposal. Let your backup guy run wild!
Softlayer does not have any restrictions on implementing TSM, Veeam, Netbackup etc. There is an incredibly powerful network at your disposal. Let your backup guy run wild!

Got some questions or a backup solution you have in softlayer that you just have to tell the world about? Hit me up the comments below!