5 replies to this topic

[Bluesplinter]

I was on my cloud's cdp account the other day, and noticed that each of the 15 daily "snapshots" was exactly 24 hours apart. This led me to wonder if on a cloud server, the r1soft agent isn't setup for continuous (or near) protection, but just takes a daily snapshot. IOW, mine seems to be taken at 8:30 in the morning, so if I put up a new set of files at 9:00, are those exposed and vulnerable until the next snapshot the following day?

Basically, I'm just not clear on exactly how "continuous" the Continuous Data Protection is for the cloud servers. And is this configurable?

Thanks!
Steve

[CH-Jonathan]

Hi Steve,

You are correct - however, the continuity of the solution (as we've implemented it) is that it maintains a consistent backup of the systems state every 24 hours (i.e. a complete image) and cannot be changed (we've scheduled these out internally so the backups run as smoothly and continuously as possible). However, you are correct, any new/changed files would be vulnerable until the next snapshot.

If you contact support, we may be able to shift your daily backup time around based on current slot availability.

Jonathan

Bluesplinter, on 22 September 2010 - 10:24 AM, said:

I was on my cloud's cdp account the other day, and noticed that each of the 15 daily "snapshots" was exactly 24 hours apart. This led me to wonder if on a cloud server, the r1soft agent isn't setup for continuous (or near) protection, but just takes a daily snapshot. IOW, mine seems to be taken at 8:30 in the morning, so if I put up a new set of files at 9:00, are those exposed and vulnerable until the next snapshot the following day?

Basically, I'm just not clear on exactly how "continuous" the Continuous Data Protection is for the cloud servers. And is this configurable?

Thanks!
Steve

[Bluesplinter]

Hey Jonathan,

No, I reckon that time is as good as any other... my clients are worldwide, so there's no one "best" time to grab a snapshot. I just needed the clarification so I would know to specify "daily backups", and not "continuous" when I'm talking to my clients.

Thanks for the info.
Steve

[CH-Jonathan]

You're very welcome.

Bluesplinter, on 22 September 2010 - 10:39 AM, said:

Hey Jonathan,

No, I reckon that time is as good as any other... my clients are worldwide, so there's no one "best" time to grab a snapshot. I just needed the clarification so I would know to specify "daily backups", and not "continuous" when I'm talking to my clients.

Thanks for the info.
Steve

[CH-Andrew]

Hello Steve,

A couple of other points I would like to add here.

- what we offer is 15 restore points using R1Soft CDP on our managed Cloud/VPS offerings - which we default to 15 daily restore points. You are certainly able to request we use those 15 restore points all in one day if you like. Or request 5 restore points per day for 3 days for example. You could also pay $0.30/GB for additional backup space and request 10 restore points a day for 30 days (or whatever you desire). Please note however, there is an overhead cost to running backups. R1Soft is "resource friendly" - at least compared to other disk based backup solutions, however, there certainly is a CPU and RAM and IO overhead involved with backups. Some customers, with heavy transactional based Data Bases, will back up their Data Bases every 2 mins for example, and pay the required resource overhead in terms of CPU, RAM and IO. This is actually where the name CDP originates from with R1Soft - in that they can backup "hot" databases, on the fly, in a near continuous manner. Realistically though, very few implement it in this manner. For our offerings specifically, we build costs into our offerings for various value added services (ie on Linux, we include CloudLinux, KSplice and R1Soft - more to come) - so, we need to allocate a certain budget to backups for each instance in order to keep our pricing and profitability at certain points.

- On all Cloud solutions (managed and self managed) - we utilize the inherit snap shot feature within NetApp, which takes additional, more real time snapshots of ALL of our Cloud data. However, we do not advertise this, nor promote it too much - as these backups are meant for a worst case, disaster recovery solution. This is not meant for day to day restorations of specific files within a Cloud instance, nor is it meant to recover a single Cloud instance, etc. The nice part about this is we even have self managed customers data protected to some level by default (again, I am actually a little hesitant to even mention this because I want to avoid self managed customers asking us to restore from our NetApp snapshots - which we typically will NOT do unless it is a special circumstance). We feel these NetApp snap shots are a good disaster recovery strategy - but, we would like any user that has expectations of Cartika maintaining backups, to utilize R1Soft. Obviously free for Managed Customers - and for Self Managed customers (or Managed customers that want greater protection then our defaults), we feel the $0.30/GB is a very reasonable and affordable price point.

Hopefully this information is useful, however, as always, please do not hesitate in contacting us if you have any additional questions

[Bluesplinter]

Hey Andrew,

Yeah, I figured you had a dedicated solution in place for the underlying NetApp infrastructure in case of something catastrophic, so I wasn't looking at CDP as system-wide disaster protection. I also knew it would be an internal-use-only backup, not for user file restore. IOW, I wasn't asking because of any fear of wide-spread failures.

I consider CDP only as a "crap, I accidentally deleted a whole directory of files!!!" safety net for users <g>. I just didn't know if you took one snapshot a day, or if you took them on a rolling basis, or what the options were.

I'll consider it and let you know if I decide on something more extensive. Daily is fine most of the time, but I might like something more granular for the first 24 hours. I dunno, but I'll think about it.

Thanks for the additional feedback,
Steve