In January Veeam acquired N2WS Software, which provide cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions. One of the products N2WS has is Cloud Protection Manager. This product allows anyone using AWS to easily schedule automated backups and disaster recovery snapshots and have them distributed across availability zones and regions.
Cloud Protection Manager supports the following targets:
- EC2 Instances
- Volumes
- RDS Databases
- Aurora Clusters
- Redshift Clusters
- DynamoDB Tables
Cloud Protection Manager is deployed easily through an AMI in the AWS Marketplace. You can read the installation instructions here
So what does Cloud Protection Manager do that you can’t already do in AWS?
Cloud Protection Manager provides the ability to have a Simple UI to manage all snapshots and recovery. Using Cloud Protection Manager you can easily configure policies and schedules and set up Disaster Recovery replication.
An example is creating a backup policy. Once you have defined your backup schedules (think daily/weekly/monthly etc), you can easily create a policy and assign backup targets.
Once you have picked your backup targets you can then specify whether you want these in a Disaster Recovery policy. By enabling Disaster Recovery you are defining which other regions in AWS will be the target for copying the snapshots.
You can easily specify single regions or multiple regions to copy the snapshots too, allowing you to easily failover your workloads or instances to different regions extremely quickly.
Reporting
One of the great features of Cloud Protection Manager is the reporting function. Trying to keep track of snapshots across multiple regions can be complex and challenging.
If we look at the snapshots view in AWS, we only see a single region:
In Cloud Protection Manager you have the ability to quickly run reports to discover whats happening in your AWS environment. When we select the reporting option, we are presented with a number of options:
If we look at the snapshots report, we can see a detailed report of all the snapshots across all instances and regions created by Cloud Protection Manager.
Recap
Cloud Protection Manager allows you to easily create and manage backups and disaster recovery options for workloads running in AWS. Being easy to deploy and quick to setup through deploying an AMI in AWS, it makes it a great solution to provide the protection and recovery options needed for running in an public cloud.
[…] week I wrote an article on how Veeam Cloud Protection Manager can be used to protect your instances in AWS. This week I want to look at how you can use Cloud […]