Cloud backup

[Garth Johnson]

Hi all

Our support company has spent the last 8 months trying to get an offsite (
Palmerston North) backup running successfully. It has now got to the point where I want to investigate cloud backup. Does any one use this method for their off site backups, and / or could they recommend a good solution provider.

Many thanks

Garth

[Alistair Baird]

Isn't what you have essentially a cloud backup solution ? What feature are you looking for in a cloud solution that your current one doesn't provide?

Garth

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Alistair Baird

IT Manager

St Peters College 

p 06 354 4198

m 021 990 259

e bai...@stpeterspn.school.nz

[Pete Mundy]

Hi Garth

If you have a Smartnet linux server I'm pretty sure Smartcom have a remote backup solution you can subscribe to.

Back in the good old days when we had fibre speeds >50/100mbit there used to be lots of schools around these parts that shared resources for off-site backups (ie lots of USB & firewire drives hosted at one school and accessed remotely by the others).

But now that the WAN landscape has changed, they've all moved them back in-house :(

Some are just taking the approach now of putting the drives them in the furtherest away building that their network can reach on their property (ie furthest away from the server, which is usually at the core) so as to reduce the chance of loosing both the server and the backups to a fire.

Pete

[Garth Johnson]

What we currently have is this:
1st backup via Veeam to secondary San storage block
This is replicated to Nas1
This is replicated to Nas2
Then it's supposed to go off site.

San is in server room
Nas1 is in another building which is an adjunct to the building that the server room is in
Nas2 is in a separate building on the other side of the campus
Offsite in in support company Dr site in Palmerston North, though this, they cannot get working reliably

Should I even be looking at off site? I am of 2 minds, but am probably leaning towards this.

[Julian Davison]

Offsite backups have the advantage that they are less likely to be impacted by site-wide events (the usual suggested disaster these days is an earthquake). The question quickly becomes 'how far offsite'. Historically the most realistic offsite ended up being a portable HD that was at someones home, though with internet links becoming faster a geographically distant destination is more viable, and better copes with the 'earthquake' scenario which can easily be city-wide.
The question often then becomes 'how much' - do you offsite-backup everything? Key operational data? Some mid-point? Is your offsite backup purely for DR? Some schools consider what they can get operational in the event of a disaster when they may wish to contact parents, but their onsite systems are non-functional, for example. On the other hand, if it's purely DR, could you cope with losing a day's work? A week? Perhaps the offsite backup is less frequent which can improve the reliability as it is less time critical (if you're doing an all-data-weekly-backup it has an entire 7 days to successfully transfer it all).
Drive the technology by the demand. I like offsite. I like network-based offsite (as it's less prone to physical hardware failure of the moved drive, and depends less on people remembering) but a number of places simply don't have the capacity to transfer enough data quickly, so it's not as common as it might be....

Cheers, Julian

Julian Davison
Technical Consultant
Decision1 IT Solutions Ltd
PO Box 368
Dunedin
P 03 471 8232
F 03 471 8234
W www.decision1.co.nz
E jul...@decision1.co.nz

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[Alistair Baird]

Anyone from Christchurch got any thoughts ?

[Julian Davison]

Do you have to be in Christchurch now, or does it count if I abandoned Christchurch February 22^nd? ;)

 

Cheers, Julian

Julian Davison
Technical Consultant
Decision1 IT Solutions Ltd
PO Box 368
Dunedin
P 03 471 8232
F 03 471 8234
W www.decision1.co.nz
E jul...@decision1.co.nz

 

[Alistair Baird]

No, just wondering what your comments are regarding backup, what data was really important to have (eg Student contact data, SMS, email) and in what priority, whether off-site was that important or on-site in several buildings. bearing in mind liquefaction that may have filled up the bottom of a server rack where a backup drive may be...

[Andrew Godfrey]

At Burnside, the issues that affected our IT services were much less severe than other Christchurch schools and we never had to restore from any backups either onsite or offsite as our systems were robust enough to handle sudden power outages and then recover properly. We were affected initially by power outages and also by being unable to use our on-site teaching facilities for about a week so having services accessible while off-site was very important.

Some businesses had their servers buried under a pile of rubble and all on-site data lost completely. In the event of a fire in the server room then maybe onsite data in another building might help but in the event of an earthquake maybe not. You need to consider different scenarios and play them through for your specific organisation and ask questions such as Julian mentioned.

Our off-site backup is now being hosted at St Andrews and their's with us. (Is 3 km far enough? - Rhetorical !) We are using a combination of VEEAM and Linux rsync and StAC is using a Microsoft solution. We are both using VPN connections to keep things secure and our offsite system just looks like another VLAN on our network . We have an onsite backup also that is a snapshot of our live data and that we use as a source for our off-site backup so that the live data backup window is not dependant on having an ultra fast off-site link. (on-site snapshot = 3 hours, off-site backup = 7 hours).

_______________________________________

 

Andrew Godfrey  |  Network Manager

[gre...@staff.cbhs.school.nz]

We decided we needed (but still haven't implemented) an off-site copy of:
* SMS inc. web front-end
* LMS
* Support infrastructure to support e.g. logging in to these.
(this assumes that all user and group files are in cloud storage, ditto email)

Note that this is referring to an operational off-site copy - i.e. hosted VMs or server - rather than just a backup.

This situation this caters for is the school being out of action (e.g. no power) for an extended period of time, but many home users having power and internet access. It should be possible to not only look up basic info (things like who are away on a field trip are important) but also to deliver some semblance of online lessons / course material to work through.

To bear in mind with this approach:
1. When in emergency mode (actively using the off-site system), then need backups of the off-site data.
2. The off-site system will become newer than the out-of-action on-site one, so you also need to plan for suitable migration back afterwards.

- Ben.

[Julian Davison]

A fairly common offering among the cloud-backup-providers I’ve dealt with is a backup which they can, on request, bring up on a VM. Fully running live cloud backup (which seems to be called ‘cloud replication’ by many) tends to be more expensive than the on-request-VM.

This provides similar functionality with a slight lag – we tended to be talking about having the VM of your backup up and running within an hour, though the exact time frame will depend on your chosen vendor.

If you’re slightly more DIY oriented you could achieve exactly this with your preferred cloud-compute-provider to provision both a backup and subsequent VM.

 

Cheers, Julian

Julian Davison
Technical Consultant
Decision1 IT Solutions Ltd
PO Box 368
Dunedin
P 03 471 8232
F 03 471 8234
W www.decision1.co.nz
E jul...@decision1.co.nz

 

From: techies-f...@googlegroups.com [mailto:techies-f...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of gre...@staff.cbhs.school.nz
Sent: Wednesday, 17 June 2015 3:28 p.m.
To: techies-f...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [techies-for-schools] Re: Cloud backup

 

We decided we needed (but still haven't implemented) an off-site copy of:

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[gre...@staff.cbhs.school.nz]

I would venture that such a backup-into-VM approach would be perfectly adequate for most.
To bear in mind with this approach: testing that it works (e.g. following major changes) may be more involved.

[Julian Davison]

Slightly more involved. But, particularly if the source is already a VM, it’s a well tested procedure and based on well established technology, so the backup-to-VM step is fairly robust.

 

Cheers, Julian

Julian Davison
Technical Consultant
Decision1 IT Solutions Ltd
PO Box 368
Dunedin
P 03 471 8232
F 03 471 8234
W www.decision1.co.nz
E jul...@decision1.co.nz

 

From: techies-f...@googlegroups.com [mailto:techies-f...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of gre...@staff.cbhs.school.nz
Sent: Wednesday, 17 June 2015 4:32 p.m.
To: techies-f...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [techies-for-schools] Re: Cloud backup

 

I would venture that such a backup-into-VM approach would be perfectly adequate for most.

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[J B]

This is why I suggested a n4l shared datacenter or server space so backups could be done with gear like nas's or vm servers on a local (n4l) noncontested link at their original consultation meetings, you can see how far that got, for now the options are another school over VPN rather than dedicated vlan over the provider or sending everything to the other side of the globe.  Were choose another school for now, if you both have failover capacity in your vm servers you can even spin up your servers -assuming compatible systems- everyone's answer seems to be cloud only though despite the comparitively tiny connection speeds.  MS now offers asure ad so you can actually replicate your whole ad to the cloud for free anyway as I understand it.

Sent from my Windows Phone

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From: Julian Davison
Sent: ‎6/‎17/‎2015 4:52 PM
To: 'techies-f...@googlegroups.com'
Subject: RE: [techies-for-schools] Re: Cloud backup