On June 29th, Commvault, a global enterprise leader in intelligent data services across on premises, cloud and SaaS environments, announced it has expanded its strategic partnership to include MetallicDMaaS to Oracle Cloud
As hybrid cloud solutions became critical for customers, in 2019 Commvault created a venture called Metallic – its first SaaS offering to better provide Data Management-as-aService (DMaas) across multi-cloud environment
As part of Commvault’s continued support for customer’s hybrid and multi cloud journeys Metallic’s industry-leading services will now also be offered on OCI and available in all commercials OCI regions globally and be available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace
OCI coupled with Metallic data management as a service (DMaaS) enables enterprise customers to protect and secure their data against threats, adhere to local data residency laws, and ease data management and recovery
Together, Metallic and OCI will deliver superior price-performance, built-in enhanced security, and simplified recovery and management for enterprise customers looking to accelerate their OCI transition and protect critical data assets in the cloud while maintaining complete flexibility across customer-managed storage or a fully managed Metallic data protection service.
Metallic’s data protection now spans Oracle Cloud VMware virtual machines, Oracle Database, Oracle bare metal servers, Oracle Containers for Kubernetes, and Oracle Linux and becomes available to over 400,000 Oracle enterprise customers looking to leverage Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for protecting their mission critical data.
In addition to the offering with Oracle, Metallic also delivers Backup-as-a-Service and Data Management-as-a-Service solutions for Microsoft Azure and AWS.
Metallic is the only DMaaS solution to protect across Azure, AWS and now OCI
Special Points of Note:
Expanded partnership is part of Commvault’s continued support for customer’s hybrid and multi cloud journeys
Metallic is the only DMaaS solution to protect across AWS, Azure and OCI to help enterprises’ multi-cloud journey
Benefits include:
Speeds cloud adoption for backup copies, driving data to OCI
It helps to ease data mobility, make it simpler to customers to securely move VMs and apps to OCI
Provides seamless protection of OCI workloads to OCI – with management across full data estate
Secure Backup from Ransomware and Malware
Secure – Air-gapped ransomware protection with encryption built-in
Flexible – Meet long and short-term data retention needs with OCI Standard and OCI Infrequent storage tier backup targets for Metallic DMaaS
Simple – Purchase. Add. Apply. Single pane of glass management makes administration easy
Commvault and Oracle: a 25-year history of integration
Commvault has long supported Oracle customers protecting the crown jewels of their enterprises – their Oracle data. We have more than 3,000 joint customers, which is increasing every year, and the amount of Oracle data we are protecting has grown by more than 30% year over year.
More than 400,000 customers rely on Oracle today to run their businesses. As many of those companies are accelerating their own cloud adoption and migrating to OCI – they have a natural need for agile cloud solutions to protect along that journey.
As Oracle accelerated its own cloud business, bringing the power of OCI to its customer base, Commvault kept pace. In 2017, Commvault underscored our support for Oracle customers moving to OCI, through our Commvault Complete software. Two years later, we introduced Metallic SaaS – which has quickly grown to become the gold standard in data management as a service. With today’s news, Oracle customers who need all the benefits of a SaaS-delivered solution, can now harness the power of Metallic with OCI to protect their data on premises and in the cloud. We’re excited for this natural evolution of our partnership to meet customers where they are with the most innovative and flexible SaaS solutions in our industry.
We’ve all seen how cloud adoption is accelerating, along with a need for multi-cloud solutions, with 89% of companies reporting a multi-cloud strategy. (1) Unfortunately, the timing of this cloud transformation comes at the same time as some unprecedented risks:
First, ransomware and new cyberattacks are quickly trending in the wrong direction. We’ve not only seen a massive spike in successful breaches, but also a growing sophistication in the nature of attacks. We’ve heard the adage before, it’s not “if,” it’s “when” — creating new risk around data and system protection.
Second, constrained resources. Successful digital transformation takes new and unique skills, to drive change and accelerate to the cloud. This complimented with the well-publicized skills gap leads many IT organizations hamstrung in an already do-more-with-less world.
And lastly, hybrid cloud data sprawl. As companies drive to digital transformation faster than ever, business data is increasingly spread across every application, device, on-prem, and cloud environment. This multi-generational data sprawl is challenging to manage and safeguard, even more so now as hybrid cloud strategies take hold.
By adding support for protecting OCI workloads and writing to OCI Storage, Metallic’s data protection now spans OCI VMs; Oracle Databases; and Oracle Container Engine. Additionally, Oracle Linux is available to over 400,000 Oracle enterprise customers and the more than 100,000 customers who have relied on Commvault technology and are looking to leverage Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to protect their mission-critical data.
Yesterday I write on Installing and Configuring Unitrends free edition. Today I will cover protecting your assets with Asset Protection. Then we will go over Job Creation. This allows you to have a backup of your VM’s for free!
Requirements:
For this scenario we will be using vCenter 5.5.
And we are off!
1. Browse to the UI.
2. Close the welcome to Unitrends free.
3. Navigate to Configure.
4. Click on the Protected Assets Tab.
5. Click Add, and select Virtual Host.
6. Put in your vCenter information and click save.
7. Now navigate to Protect.
8. Highlight your vCenter
9. Check the box next to the VM you would like to Backup.
10. Click Backup
11. A new window will popup, titled Create Backup Job.
12. Click Define Job Settings.
For now we are going to just run this job once. This is called a on demand job.
13. Under Schedule, Select when to run this job: check Now, and save.
Right away a job success window pops up.
Lets take a look at the job to verify the job’s running status.
14. Click view Jobs.
15. Click on the job, and click View Details.
Once it completes you will see a Successful Status.
Last week I wrote on Unitrends offers free backup’s with Unitrends Free. Unitrends is a leader in the backup space. And they recently announced a free edition. Today I am going to cover deploying the software via a appliance, and the post deployment configuration. This is our first Step to backing up our virtual environment, for free!
Once we finish this, we will be ready to login to the UI, setup asset protection, and create a new backup job.
Before we start:
This requires a windows machine to launch the setup with .net framework 4.0. Note this does not install on the device you run it from, but deploy’s a appliance.
Ready, get set, and GO!
1. Run the unitrends Installer.
2. Fill out the vCenter information, and click Next.
3. Next name the appliance and select the VMware host and Datastore and click Next.
4. Now select your network, and give the appliance the correct network information for your environment, and click next.
5. Now Configure the disk size, select the datastore, and disk provision method, and click install.
6. Now browse to the IP Address, and proceed by ignoring any SSL warning, and agree to the agreement.
7. Next we will setup the Date and time on the appliance. Once you have made any adjustments click next.
8. Now we set the hostname, domain name, and password. Click Next.
9. Next we set the mail server information and click Finish.
On the next write up. I will cover protecting assets and creating jobs.
When is the last time your backups were tested? For me, personally, it was a couple weeks ago. My wife and I were sleeping beside our very sick child in the hospital (he’s great now, by the way). My wife got up in the night to do something and her phone hit the floor – one of those unfortunate and precise hits that ruined the phone. The screen detached but didn’t shatter, but I wasn’t able to pull data off of it the next day. I went into one of my company’s stores and purchased a new phone. While there, I saw another father from our daycare who was doing the same – buying a new phone to replace his that ended up taking a cola bath. While I stayed and began my restore from the cloud backup, he left with fingers crossed that he might be able to dry out his phone in a bag of rice and get data off of it. I honestly don’t know if he succeeded. I left that store an hour later with an exact duplicate of my wife’s phone from a day earlier.
It’s a pretty common scenario at home. It’s a common scenario in business, too. Four years ago, a friend called me one Monday morning. She arrived to work to find out that her office suite had been flooded due to a burst pipe in the unit above her. No one was able to find her contact information over the weekend and so she arrived to the shock of her life – a very soggy and expensive problem. When she called me, she needed to know how safe her data was and to see about how to handle several computers who had spent the weekend at an indoor waterpark. After going through something of that magnitude, it brings a whole new urgency to data protection and she was ready to sign up for a cloud backup immediately. Two years later, another (near) tragedy struck – this time in the form of data corruption that lost all the data in her NAS. Fortunately, all the data was protected online and was restored to a clean volume a short time later. I could tell you other stories without happy endings from my years of experience.
The good news is that cloud backups or backup as a service makes it incredibly easy and attainable to have a bullet-proof backup strategy. It’s basically Baskin Robbins in cloud backup today – there’s a flavor for everyone. You can choose from simple file-based backups all the way up to mirrors of production servers that can be booted up in the cloud during a disaster. There’s specialized application mirror and application aware backups and everything in between. The moral of the story and what I hope you think about, is how safe is your data? Yes, you may have a backup that runs without error – but when’s the last time you tested a restore?
The infographic below from SingleHop gives some stats on cloud backups along with the causes and costs of downtime.
Change Block Tracking (CBT) is a technology in VMware used to record all the changed data within a VMDK file so that when backup software runs incremental backups, it knows exactly what has changed and can send only differences to the backup software. This is a technology that greatly improves backup speed and efficiency by only moving changed data. With many backup software moving to an incremental forever process, change block tracking is an enabling technology for the backup.
Most software can enable CBT on an individual VM, however, if you are in the beginning phases of implementing a new backup software or virtual deployment, you may want to proactively enable CBT across the entire farm. There may also be instances where a few of your VMs have CBT disabled and you need to enable it for just those VMs. I developed a script I used myself to enable CBT across an entire vCenter instance, which checks for VMs with CBT disabled and then goes through the process of reconfiguring the VM, taking a snapshot and removing the snapshot to enable CBT on the VM.
The script is below. Please be warned – as written – this script removes any existing snapshots on the VMs with CBT disabled.
Many backup vendors support vSphere, VMware’s flagship virtualization platform. But now, HP’s Data Protector platform supports the extended vCloud layer directly with integration against VMware’s vCloud Director. Workloads in highly virtualized datacenter are much more dynamic than traditional IT and the addition of vCloud Director to an environment only accellerates the ebb and flow of virtual machines. The new integration in Data Protector offers the ability to setup dynamic backups which can encompass changing workloads by integrating that the top level, vCloud layer.
Data Protector can be pointed directly at a particular vCloud organzation and will be able to backup anything under that organization with a single checkbox. Regardless of how much or how often the systems under that organization changes, Data Protector will still protect it completely. The integration fully supports the vCloud vStorage API’s which allows for full, application consistent backups by utilizing VMware’s snapshot capabilities. The snapshots will call into the VM’s tools and will even coordinate a consistent snapshot with the OS running inside of the VM. This ensures the most reliable data recoveries possible.
The new vCloud Director integration joins a slew of additional new capabilities within the Data Protector 7 release, including support for the StoreOnce deduplication technology at any level within the backup process. StoreOnce deduplication has been fully baked into the software in Data Protector 7 allowing for deduplication at the end-point, in transit or at rest on the StoreOnce deduplication device. It also allows for portability of thin backups without the need for rehydration, saving both bandwidth and time.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Below is a video demo of the vCloud Director integration into HP Data Protector. You can get a good idea of how simple the interface for the vCloud integration is within the backup console. To an existing customer, the interface looks almost identical to the vSphere integration that has existed for several years.
A few years ago, I wrote about peer-to-peer backup for the first time. To date, its one of my most popular articles on the site. The primary focus of my post was Crashplan, a freely available software that allowed people to backup their data to a friend at no charge. I have really loved their service over several years. I have Crashplan setup to backup some data to friend and I have a couple friends who backup to me.
Up until last year, I was also a Mozy user. I thought they had the best value out there for backup to cloud. But last year, Mozy made their changes to their service offering which would have effectively tripled my cost and so I went on a search for alternatives. I settled on a new product called SafeCopy. After a year, I was not happy and so I have let that go, too. My main compliant was that the SafeCopy software didn’t seem to be very efficient at running backups. I saw long periods with no traffic while it prepared files for backup. With as much to backup as I have, a strong consistent stream of data means a much quicker initial backup.
I realized only a month after I started my SafeCopy subscription, the move I should have made was to subscribe to Crashplan Central – Crashplan’s cloud backup offering. This past week, I canceled SafeCopy and I signed up for a Crashplan Central family plan and have I two computers currently running backup.
As luck would have it, I was also able to subscribe to a higher tier of cable Internet at home which gives me a 2 Mbps upstream connection. With these two things in place, I have already completed about 10% of my initial backup without any interruption to service at home. I do have to stop backups when I get a cell call (which sucks) because of my Microcell needs, but I’m trying to minimize the time needed to complete my initial backup so I have the bandwidth restrictions set high on both computers.
I’m really happy with having a single service and single piece of backup software to handle both peer-to-peer and cloud backups. I should have made this decisions sooner. Well, if I don’t count the Time Machine backups I’m also doing at home… But since that’s built-in to the OS, I don’t count it – it just happens.
Crashplan really excels in allowing you to define how much bandwidth any backup stream can consume and when it can be run. There are many options to limit the amount of CPU that the software can consume under different conditions. There are good inbound and outbound bandwidth options to keep your outgoing backups or your friends incoming ones from saturating your connection. There are pretty easy to understand options for how often files get backed up after the initial installation. Users can secure the backup streams with a custom password and 448-bit encryption or they may use the standard 448-bit encryption. The client software can also be secured with a password to keep a guest or malicious user from tampering with settings.
I also like that there is a background service that runs always and there is a client software to configure the settings for the service. This architecture really works really well.
Strangely enough, the Crashplan software will not allow me to add my desktop computer to my client on the laptop as a ‘Friend’ to backup to it when I am traveling. I’m sure there is a reason why, but just seems strange that they won’t allow me to add a client registered my own account.
But, I have to say, I’m a happy customer so far. Happy enough to write an updated review.
File this under the “why’s that happening” category… About a week ago, I noticed that my MacBook Pro’s Time Machine stopped working. It has been working flawlessly to an external drive hosted on my iMac at home, but I wanted something to back it up when I was on the road – for an upcoming trip where we’re likely to have lots of photos. (My friends lost a hard drive in their Mac while traveling across the country.)
Today, I found an article in ComputerWorld which links Mozy Backup to problems in Time Machine. On further investigation, it is my problem. As soon as I loaded Mozy on my MacBook Pro, the Time Machine problems began. Unfortunately, I thought I had a corrupt spare image file on the backup volume, so I purged it and tried to start over. Unfortunately, I was unable to start over and successfully backup my Mac using Time Machine. After a couple tries, I did get it to work, only to find the next morning that it too had reported a problem with the disk image and had failed. So, I’m down on my Time Machine, but for anyone else seeing these problems, thought the link above might be useful.
When is the last time your backups were tested? For me, personally, it was a couple weeks ago. My wife and I were sleeping beside our very sick child in the hospital (he’s great now, by the way). My wife got up in the night to do something and her phone hit the floor – one of those unfortunate and precise hits that ruined the phone. The screen detached but didn’t shatter, but I wasn’t able to pull data off of it the next day. I went into one of my company’s stores and purchased a new phone. While there, I saw another father from our daycare who was doing the same – buying a new phone to replace his that ended up taking a cola bath. While I stayed and began my restore from the cloud backup, he left with fingers crossed that he might be able to dry out his phone in a bag of rice and get data off of it. I honestly don’t know if he succeeded. I left that store an hour later with an exact duplicate of my wife’s phone from a day earlier.
