Cloud Environments

Cloud Environment Overview

Commvault^® is a leader in the protection, management, and migration of cloud infrastructure. Whether it is a public cloud environment (cloud provider), a private cloud infrastructure (on-premises) or a hybrid cloud made of both cloud and on-premises, Commvault^® Software offers tools to handle ever-growing cloud environments.

Here is some an example of available tools:

Application Agents
Virtual Server Agents
Application-Aware features
Workflows

Before deciding which options to use, it is first important to collect information about the environment to protect, as well as understanding the differences between cloud offerings. This can significantly impact the features available to use.

What is a Cloud?

Several cloud offerings and technologies can be used when building a cloud infrastructure. They are classified in the following major categories, which basically defines the responsibility boundaries between the customer and the cloud provider:

Private cloud (or on-premises) - a cloud infrastructure hosted on-premises where the customer is responsible for managing the entire stack (hardware and software).
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (or IaaS) - A public cloud environment hosted by a cloud provider allowing a customer to run virtual machines. The cloud vendor is responsible to manage the hardware (physical servers, storage, and networking), while the customer is responsible to create and maintain virtual machines. This includes maintaining the operating system, applications, and data.
Platform-as-a-Service (or PaaS) - As the name suggests, the cloud vendor provides a platform that typically includes the hardware, the operating system, the database engine, a programming language execution environment, as well as web servers. The customer is not responsible to maintain any virtual servers and can focus on using the framework to develop applications using databases. The customer is therefore responsible to maintain the applications and the data. Good examples of PaaS are Microsoft^® Azure Database services and Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS).
Software-as-a-Service (or SaaS) - A cloud-based application for which the cloud provider is responsible in its entirety. This includes the application itself, which is offered 'on-demand' to the customer. A good example of SaaS is Microsoft^® Office 365.

Responsibility boundaries by cloud offering

Commvault^® Software Feature Parity

The cloud offerings in use within the cloud infrastructure dictate the Commvault^® Software agents and features to use. A clear understanding of these features is important since parity is not the same across all cloud offerings. For instance, when using Platform-as-a-Service, Commvault^® Software is bound to use the cloud vendor APIs which can limit the capabilities of the software. When using Infrastructure-as-a-Service, access to storage may be limited, preventing to use advanced features such as Commvault IntelliSnap^® snapshots. The following graphic provides an overview of the feature parity across offerings.

General Commvault^® Software feature parity

Disaster Recovery and Cloud

Over the last few years, not only is cloud computing included in disaster recovery plans, but for some organizations, it is the main disaster recovery solution. Cloud computing billing is built on a resource usage model. The more resources you use, the more you pay. This makes it an ideal solution to host a standby disaster recovery environment that can be brought online. In several cases, it is less costly than maintaining a complete disaster recovery infrastructure in a secondary site. Cloud storage can be leveraged to host a copy of the backup data, ready to be restored if needed. Furthermore, the Commvault^® Live Sync feature can be used to recover the backup data automatically, significantly reducing recovery time objectives (RTO).

Disaster Recovery using Cloud Computing

In this scenario, the data center is protected, and cloud computing is used for the recovery of the entire data center, should a disaster occur. A copy of the backup data is kept locally in the data center. A secondary copy is also sent to a cloud library. The disaster recovery workflow in such a scenario is as follows:

The main data center VMs, physical servers, and applications are backed up to a local deduplicated library.
A predefined schedule (i.e., every 30 minutes) copies the backup data to a deduplicated cloud library using the Commvault^® Dash Copy feature.
If the data center is lost in a disaster, the data recovery is initiated from the cloud library.
The virtual machines are recovered and converted into cloud provider VMs. For instance, VMWare virtual machines, protected in the data center could be recovered and converted into Microsoft^® Azure VMs.
If needed, the file system of physical servers is restored in cloud provider VMs.
Applications are restored either in VMs, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) instances.
Applications are brought online and users can connect.

Disaster Recovery to Cloud Workflow

Disaster Recovery to Cloud using Live Sync

In this scenario, an additional automation layer is added. Instead of waiting after a disaster to recover VMs and applications, data is automatically restored as soon as it reaches the cloud library. This significantly decreases recovery time objective (RTO) of systems, but incurs larger costs as the cloud resource usage is increased. In this situation, the 'Disaster Recovery' workflow is used:

The main data center VMs, physical servers, and applications are backed up to a local deduplicated library.
As soon as a backup completes, the data is copied to a deduplicated cloud library using the Commvault^® Dash Copy feature.
As soon as the copy to the cloud library completes, a recovery process is automatically initiated.
The virtual machines are recovered and converted into cloud provider VMs. For instance, VMWare virtual machines, protected in the data center could be recovered and converted into Microsoft^® Azure VMs.
If needed, the file system of physical servers is restored in cloud provider VMs.
Applications are restored either in VMs, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) instances.
If a disaster occurs, applications are brought online and users can connect.

Disaster Recovery Workflow when using Live Sync to Cloud