Maintaining data integrity and guaranteeing business continuity is of utmost importance for any organisation. However, in today's world, those systems have grown in complexity and cost, while the business demands IT agility and lower costs. In this talk, we will explore how organisations should approach backup and disaster recovery, and how these two aspects can be implemented in the cloud to improve efficiency and flexibility. The talk starts with general concepts, and then dives into technical details, culminating in real customer examples that showcase some tips and tricks and the benefits of a cloud-based approach.

1. Dean Samuels
Rules for Backup and Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
Solution Architect

2. Agenda
• Prologue The need for Backup and DR
• Rules Backup and DR with AWS
• Customer Reference Ausenco and NZ Post

3. The need for Backup and DR

4. Some “natural” examples….
after Brisbane Floods – January 13th 2011Coronation Drive, Milton, QLD.…
Photos: http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/qld-floods/

5. Some “natural” examples….
after Brisbane Floods – January 13th 2011Coronation Drive, Milton, QLD.…
Photos: http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/qld-floods/

6. Some “natural” examples….
after Brisbane Floods – January 13th 2011Coronation Drive, Milton, QLD.…
Photos: http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/qld-floods/

7. Some “natural” examples….
Christchurch Earthquake - Feb 22nd 2011Manchester & Glouchester Street, Christchurch....
Photos: http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/christchurch-quake/

8. Some “natural” examples….
after Hurricane Sandy – October 29th 2012Breezy Point, Queens, NY, USA.…
Photos: http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/hurricane-sandy-before-after-photos/

9. What about “human-made” examples….
“Everything fails, all the time”
Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com

10. Backup and DR with AWS
Drivers for Backup and DR with AWS

11. Business and Technical Drivers with AWS….
Reduce costs
Slash DR budgets by up to 50%
Consolidate sites
Eliminate the need to run a
secondary site
Reduce on-premise
Eliminate 30%+ of on-premise
physical equipment
Remove aging
technologies
Eliminate tape for backup and
archive

12. The fundamental economic model…
Utility, on-demand datacenter
Primary Site
Routers
Firewalls
Network
Application Licenses
Operating Systems
Hypervisor
Servers
SAN
Primary Storage
Backup
Archive
AWS
Routers
Firewalls
Network
Application Licenses
Operating Systems
Hypervisor
Servers
SAN
Snapshot Storage
Backup
Archive
Secondary
site costs

13. You can have different DR solutions
• Easy to integrate existing vendors with DR on AWS
• Approach: One vendor/hybrid/multiple vendors
• One region/multi-regions (if you need geo-diversity)
• Different DR Architectures
Backup & Restore Pilot light
Warm standby in
AWS
Multi-site solution
in AWS & on-
premise

14. Assets will sit on a spectrum of technical complexity…
DR & business continuity
Rebuild when
required from
offsite backup
Run hot-hot
configuration with
auto-failover
Recovery Time Objective
(RTO)
How quickly you need this asset to be recovered?
e.g. 1min? 15min? 1hr? 4hrs? 1day?
Recovery Point Objective
(RPO)
How ‘fresh’ the recovery must be for the asset?
e.g. zero data loss, 15mins out of date?

15. Backup and DR with AWS
Backup and Storage Options

16. Simple Storage Service
Highly scalable object storage
1 byte to 5TB in size
99.999999999% durability
Elastic Block Store
High performance block storage device
1GB to 1TB in size
Mount as drives to instances with
snapshot/cloning functionalities
Glacier
Long term object archive
Extremely low cost per gigabyte
99.999999999% durability
Storage Options
Very fast
‘instance’ disks
Slow, rare accessFast web object
storage

17. Storage Gateway – Connect On-Prem with the AWS Cloud
1. Local, low-latency access to the
most frequently used files while
storing all data in Amazon S3
(Cached-Volumes)
Or
2. Scheduled off-site backups to
Amazon S3 for on-premises data
(Stored-Volumes)

18. Cost
($/GB/month)
Performance Durability
Amazon S3 0.095  
Amazon Glacier 0.01  
AWS Storage Gateway
0.095
(+ 125/GW)
 
Amazon EBS 0.10  
Amazon EBS (PIOPS) 0.125  
*AWS Oregon pricing
Storage Options

19. Backup and DR with AWS
Backup and DR Rules

20. 1. My backup should be accessible
2. My backup should be able to scale
3. My backup should be safe
4. My backup should work with a DR policy
5. Someone should care about it
Backup Rules

21. VPN
Public / AWS Direct Connect
AWS Import/Export
Backup Rules – My backup should be accessible

22. GW-Cached volumes
GW-stored volumes
“Warm” storage
“Cold”
Backup Rules – My backup should be accessible

23. Access both via SDKs and via third-party software
S3 Glacier
Internet Web
Services API
HTTP(S)
Via SDK Via 3rd parties

24. • “Infinite” scale with Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier
• Scale to multiple regions
• Seamless
• No need to provision
• Cost tiers (cheaper at scale)
Backup Rules – My backup should be able to scale

25. • SSL Endpoints (Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier)
• Signed API calls
• Store encrypted files
• Server-side encryption
• Multiple copies across different data centers
• Local/cloud with AWS Storage Gateway
Backup Rules – My backup should be safe

26. Backup Rules – My backup should work with a DR policy

27. • Clear ownership
• Permissions with IAM: Users, groups  roles
• Logs
• AWS support
Backup Rules – Someone should care about it

28. Pilot light
Stopped
instances

29. Pilot light
Running
instances

30. Backup and DR with AWS
A “Backup/Restore” & “Pilot Light” reference…

31. Remember Brisbane, QLD…..
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/qld-floods/

32. Brisbane - January 13th 2011
Ausenco
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/qld-floods/

33. • ASX200 company
• Head office in Brisbane
• 29 Offices in 19 countries
• 3500 Employees
Ausenco Offices

34. The Result
• Low effort
• Incremental rollout
• Cloud migration
• Efficient, effective usage of bandwidth
• Application/database servers
• Regionalised deployment

35. • New Zealand Post is a state-owned
enterprise responsible for providing
postal services in New Zealand.
• “Pilot Light” Disaster Recovery solution
for NZ Post Online platform
• VPN connectivity back to on-premise
for data synchronisation of business
systems
New Zealand Post – Agile Disaster Recovery
“AWS is providing us a cost
effective and highly agile
disaster recovery capability
for our online platform.”
Rob Holmes, Head of Online

36. Backup and DR with AWS
The new HA/DR continuum…

37. The new HA/DR continuum…
DR with High Availability

38. App DR with Standby
The new HA/DR continuum…

39. Reducing Costs
• AWS cost reduction (e.g, S3 cost reduction on Apr 2nd 2013)
• Reduced redundancy (Amazon S3)
• Retention policy
• Hot/warm/cool/cold backup
• Reserved capacity/tiers
0–1 TB 0.095 0.076
1–50 TB 0.080 0.064
50–500 TB 0.070 0.056
500–1,000 TB 0.065 0.052
1–5 PB 0.060 0.048
5+ PB 0.055 0.037
Amazon S3
Standard
$/GB/Month
Reduced
$/GB/Month
34
Price
Reductions