Specialist vs generalist and why it matters for Australian MSPs
Have you ever encountered a hard disk failure before?
I am sure almost all of you had experienced some form of data lost before. Did your laptop’s suffered from Hard-Disk Drive(HDD) crashed before? Has your server received an outage and some of the data could not be recovered? Did you know that can even if you had done a backup; backups CAN FAIL! What happens when just that one backup is your only lifeline? And how do you prevent this?
3-2-1 Rule for Backup Strategy
For those of you who have never heard of the 3-2-1 rule before; it is the best strategy to follow to prevent data losses:
3 means – Have three copies of backup. Production or your Primary Data counts as one Copy.
2 means – Storing the backup on two different mediums. Don’t put all your eggs in to one basket!
1 means – Keep on copy offsite. What happens if all of your backup's are on the same location?
Scenario for Backup
Using a scenario for the 3-2-1 rule; 'Company XYZ' is running some Virtual Machines (VM) on a VMware or Hyper-V Server. The actual primary production data sits in the Storage Area Network (SAN) storage (Refer to Item 1).
The IT Administrator uses Veeam and the backup is done locally, storing it onto the Network Access Storage (NAS) which is attached to a Backup Server. This NAS doubles up as a backup repository (Refer to Item 2).
The IT Administrator runs an offsite copy job and the data is copied into an Azure VM with a storage target (Block blob type) or an Off-site Disaster Recovery (DR) (Refer to item 3).
3-2-1
So now we have three copies of data:
Item 1 : The first copy is actually the production data that is sitting on the SAN Storage.
Item 2 : The second copy is stored on the NAS
Item 3 : The third copy is stored on Azure.
Of these three copies, we will need to have two mediums that are different:
Media 1 : The first media is stored onto the NAS.
Media 2: The second media is stored at Azure.
Out of these two different mediums, a single media is stored at one off-site location.
Off-site 1 : Azure is considered as an off-site location, in the cloud.
Physical Backup with Veeam
Pretty simple right? Some of you may ask, what about my physical desktops, laptops and servers?
In the 2nd quarter of the 2017 (estimated April 2017), Veeam will also release Veeam Agent for Windows. What this means is that your local, physical Desktops and Servers can be installed with Veeam! Currently Veeam agent for Linux is available for Servers and ensures the availability of your Linux servers, regardless of whether they are deployed in the public cloud or on-premises.
What I like about the Veeam agent for Linux and Windows are the bare-metal restore features where we can easily restore the entire systems on the same or alternative hardware.
Using the Veeam agent for Linux and Windows, you can do a local backup and push to a local repository (similar to item 1 above). If you have Veeam Backup and Replication, you can then run a Backup Copy job to do an off-site copy into any cloud like Azure, SoftLayer or an Off-site location (Item 3). Do note, that to use Veeam Agent for Linux with Veeam Backup & Replication, you must install Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 1 or later on the Veeam backup server. In Linux, you must also pre-configure user access permissions on this backup repository.
Let’s look into another scenario for the physical backup using the 3-2-1 strategy for backup.
Physical Backup with the 3-2-1 Rule
So let’s use the same figure previously but add Item A as a physical server that needs to be backed up. We know that Company XYZ is running some Virtual Machines (VM) on a VMWare or Hyper-V Server; but now they have a single physical server that needs to be backed up.
In Veeam agent for Linux and Windows, you can create a local Backup Job on the PC itself using the Backup Job Wizard. To do this, you must select a Veeam Backup & Replication backup repository as a target location in the properties of a backup job. Now there is a local backup done from Physical Server (Item A) to the local repository (Item 2). The Veeam Server will run a Backup Copy job and copy the backup to the Veeam repository (Item 2) and into the off-site repository (Item 3).
Finally, a lot of IT administrators are looking forward to having Veeam’s paid support for not only our virtual servers but also for our servers and laptops! Now, we can perform on-premises restorations from backups of individual cloud instances!
By Nick Tan, Partner Enablement Specialist, rhipe
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