Cloud Backup

& Solutions
● What is Cloud
Backup?
➔ Cloud backup is a service in which the data and applications on a business’s
servers are backed up and stored on a remote server. It automatically backs up
your data to an encrypted cloud, regardless of where the data comes from. In
other words, your cloud BaaS (Backend as a service) can be programmed to
backup data stored on your company PC, laptop, tablet, or mobile device.

➔ Customers typically backup and restore their data and apps using a web browser
or a service provider’s control panel.

➔ Cloud server backup is a necessity for many organizations today because they
store most or all of their business-critical data and applications on cloud servers.
● Why do we need
it?
Safeguarding Data and Apps Rapid Data Recovery
By storing critical data and applications off-site, The data backed up by cloud servers can be
they are protected from local weather restored quickly, enabling a company to
disturbances and outages. rapidly gain access to the desired files or
systems.

Flexible Storage
Reliable Disaster Recovery
Unlike traditional backup techniques where
Backup cloud services provide users with
data is locally stored on a hard drive or tape
instant access to much-needed data and
with limited capacity, cloud-based backup can
apps in the case of a disaster, whether
be quickly scaled up or down.
natural or manmade.
● Cloud Backup
Solution

1 Full system or image backups: An image backup creates a complete copy of a volume, including all
system files, the boot record, and any other data contained on the disk. To create an image backup of an
active system, you may need to stop all applications (quiesce the system). An image backup allows a
system to do what is referred to as a bare metal restore. Ghost is an example of software that supplies this
type of backup.

2
Point-in-time (PIT) backups or snapshots: The data is backed up, and then every so often
changes are amended to the backup creating what is referred to as an incremental backup. This type of
backup lets you restore your data to a point in time and saves multiple copies of any file that has been
changed. At least 10 to 30 copies of previous versions of files should be saved. The first backup is quite
slow over an Internet connection, but the incremental backup can be relatively fast. For example,
software such as Carbonite may take several days to backup a system, but minutes to create the
snapshot.
● Cloud Backup
Solution

3 Differential and incremental backups: A differential backup is related to an incremental backup,

but with some subtle differences in the way the archive bit is handled. During an incremental backup, any
changed files are copied to the backup media and their archive attribute is cleared by the incremental
backup. In a differential backup, all of the changed files since the last full backup are copied by the
backup software, which requires that the software leave the archive bit set to ON for any differential
backup, as only a full backup can clear all files’ archive bit.

4 Reverse Delta backup: A reverse delta backup creates a full backup first and then periodically
synchronizes the full copy with the live version. The older versions of files that have been changed are
archived so that a historical record of the backup exists. Among the software that uses this system is
Apple’s Time Machine and the RDIFF-BACKUP utility.
● Cloud Backup
Solution

5 Continuous Data Protection (CDP) or mirroring: The goal of this type of backup system is to
create a cloned copy of your current data or drive. A cloud storage system contains a certain built-in
latency, so unless the original data set is quiescent, the mirror lags behind the original in concurrency.

Open file backup: Some applications such as database systems and messaging systems are mission
6
critical and cannot be shut down before being backed up. An open file backup analyzes the transactions
that are in progress, compares them to the file(s) at the start of the backup and the file(s) at the end of
the backup, and creates a backup that represents a complete file as it would exist at the time the
backup started after all the transactions have been processed. This is a difficult proposition, and open file
backup systems are expensive and highly customized to a particular application such as SQL Server or
Exchange.
● Data
archival:
Project
objective
➔ The term archiving is used to specify the migration of data that is no longer in use to
secondary or tertiary long-term data storage for retention. An archive is useful for
legal compliance or to provide a long-term historical record.

➔ Note Data archives are often confused with backups, but the two operations are quite
different. A backup creates a copy of the data, whereas an archive removes older
information that is no longer operational and saves it for long-term storage. You can’t
restore your current data set from an archive. n
● Cloud Backup
Features
● Logon authentication.
● High encryption (at least 128-bit) of data transfers, preferably end-to-end, but at least for
the data that is transferred over the Internet.
● Lossless data compression to improve throughput. A related feature called differential
compression transfers only binary data that has changed since the last backup.
● Automated, scheduled backups.
● Fast backup (snapshots) after full online backup, with 10 to 30 historical versions of a file
retained.
● Data versioning with the ability to retrieve historical versions of files from different
backups.
● Multiplatform support. The most important clients to back up are Windows, Macintosh,
and Linux/Unix.
● Cloud Backup
Features(contd.)
● Bare file/folder restore.
● Adequate bandwidth and perhaps scalable bandwidth options to which to upgrade.
● Web-based management console with ease-of-use features such as drag and drop, e-mail
updates, and file sharing.
● 24x7 technical support.
● Backed up data set validation; checking to determine if the backed up data matches the original
data.
● Logging and reporting of operations.
● Open file backups of mission-critical transactional systems such as enterprise databases or e-
mail/messaging applications.
● Multisite storage or replication, enabling data failover
● Cloud Data
Management
Interface
(CDMI)
A cloud data management interface (CDMI) is a
system for creating, retrieving, updating and
deleting data from the cloud. CDMI is the
component of cloud-based software and services
that is at the heart of how these products and
services are used.
● CDMI includes commands that allow applications to access cloud storage and create, retrieve,
update, and delete data objects; provides for data object discovery; enables storage data systems
to
communicate with one another; and provides for security using standard storage protocols,
monitoring and billing, and authentication methods. CDMI uses the same authorization and
authentication mechanism as N FS (Network File System) does.

● In the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), the storage space is partitioned into units called
containers. A container stores a set of data in it and serves as the named object upon which data
service operations are performed. The CDMI data object can manage CDMI containers, as well as
containers that are accessible in cloud storage through other supported protocols.

● In the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), the storage space is partitioned into units called
containers. A container stores a set of data in it and serves as the named object upon which data
service operations are performed. The CDMI data object can manage CDMI containers, as well as
containers that are accessible in cloud storage through other supported protocols. Figure 15.8 shows
the SNIA cloud storage management model.
● CDMI can access objects stored in the cloud by using standard HTTP command and the REST (Representational
State Transfer) protocol to manipulate those objects. CDMI also can discover objects and can export and
manage those exported objects as part of a storage space called a container. CDMI provides an interface
through which applications can gain access to the storage objects in a container over the Web. Other features
of CDMI are access controls, usage accounting, and the ability to advertise containers so that applications see
these containers as if they are volumes (LUNs with a certain size).

● CDMI uses metadata for HTTP, system, user, and storage media attributes accessing them through a standard
interface using a schema that is known as the Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA). In this architecture, every
resource is identified by a standardized URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) that may be translated into both
hypertext (HTTP) and other forms. CDMI uses the SNIA eXtensible Access Method (XAM) to discover and
access metadata associated with each data object.

● Metadata is stored not only for data objects, but for data containers so that any data placed into a
container assumes the metadata associated with that container. Should there be conflicting metadata at
different levels of the hierarchy (container, object, and so on), the most granular level object’s metadata
attribute takes precedence.
 Cloud Storage Gateways
(CSG)
● A cloud storage gateway is a hardware- or software-based appliance located on the customer
premises that serves as a bridge between local applications and remote cloud-based
storage.
● A cloud storage gateway provides basic protocol translation and simple connectivity to allow the
incompatible technologies to communicate transparently.
● The gateway may be a stand-alone computing device or a virtual machine (VM) image that
provides basic protocol translation and connectivity that allows incompatible technologies to
communicate transparently.
● The need for a bridge between cloud storage systems and enterprise applications arose because
of an incompatibility between the protocols used for public cloud technologies and legacy
storage systems.
● Most public cloud providers rely on Internet protocols, usually a RESTful API over HTTP, rather
than conventional storage area network (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS) protocols.
● Many of today's cloud storage gateway products provide data de-duplication and compression
capabilities to make use of available bandwidth efficiently and move data as quickly as possible.
● A cloud storage gateway is also known as a cloud storage controller or cloud storage appliance.
● A cloud storage gateway is designed to provide interoperability between different data protocols
used in a client/server cloud architecture.
● It allows interoperability between the application programming interface (API) of a client's
REST/SOAP-based data storage and Internet SCSI (iSCSI), Fiber Channel (FC).
● Generally, cloud storage gateways are implemented as software gateways that provide a suite of
services to facilitate seamless data transfer and retrieval between remote cloud storage servers,
data compression for faster transfer, version management and control of entire storage
snapshots and run-time encryption, which ensures secure data transmission.
CSG: It’s features
1. Automated scheduled local & cloud backup
2. Selective file backup
3. Bandwidth optimized cloud backup with block-level de-duplication
4. Supports Windows, Linux and Mac
5. Application-aware backup for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint and Active Directory
6. Microsoft Hyper-V backup and restore for VMs