Data Protection in Public Cloud (Networker Backups in AWS)

When a cloud strategy is developed, it is very important to include data protection. As more and more enterprise applications move to cloud, only the resilient cloud infrastructure is not enough as corruptions, accidental deletion etc. can still happen and backup must be included in the cloud strategy.

Most cloud providers provide native snapshot functionality however snapshots are not the same as backup. Snapshots are not application consistent and do not support granular recovery.

The Dell EMC Networker with CloudBoost solution provides optimized data protection for enterprise applications regardless of whether they are running on-premises or in public cloud. Here are the various use cases.

Here I am going to share more about “Backup in the Cloud”, where Enterprises have workloads running in the public cloud virtual machines (here AWS EC2) and would like to use public cloud object storage (here AWS S3) to store the backups.

Solution Components

Networker is a unified data protection software solution for the enterprises that centralizes, automates and accelerates backup and recovery across multi-platform environments, both physical and virtual.

CloudBoost is a data protection-optimized cloud enabler for use on-premises and in the cloud. It employs source-side encryption, compression, deduplication and WAN optimization for highly efficient backup in the cloud.

AWS S3 is a highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive object storage provided by AWS.

While testing this, I have used public cloud infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Service (AWS). Our production servers/VMs are running as EC2 instances in a private subnet in AWS VPC and have Networker client installed. These being the Linux clients, the backup data will directly flow to object storage (AWS S3) and only meta-data will go to Networker Server and CloudBoost Appliance.

In this demo, Networker server and CloudBoost appliance are also installed in private subnet. Public subnet hosts a jump host for external users to connect and a NAT gateway.

All the production VMs (EC2 instances) required to be backed up, which are running in private as well as public subnet. With this, let us start configuration tasks and test backup and restore of EC2 instances to S3 Bucket.

High level Steps:

1. Install and Configure Networker Server and clients on EC2 instances
2. Deploy the CloudBoost appliance from EC2 AMI
3. Register and Configure CloudBoost appliance in the EMC Cloud Portal
4. Configure Networker to work with CloudBoost appliance
5. Perform Test Backups
6. Perform Test Restore

1.       Install and Configure Networker Server and clients on EC2 instances

It is assumed that Networker Server and Clients are already installed and configured as per standard procedures on EC2 instances. Make sure that EC2 instance has sufficient role assigned to write to S3.

2.       Deploy CloudBoost appliance from EC2 AMI

Use the CloudBoost AMI to launch an EC2 instance of size m4.xlarge in Private subnet of VPC. Also make sure that require ports are opened in the Security Group and this instance can connect to DellEMC Cloud Portal on port 443 and EC2 instance has sufficient role assigned to write to S3.

Once deployed, ssh to CloudBoost and verify the status

Change Hostname and other details if required

admin@mag-fs> fqdn cloudboostappliance.ap-southeast-1.compute.internal

 * Processing request

 * Changing hostname

 * Restarting DHCP

 * Restarting configuration controller

 * Restarting configuration agent

 * Restarting statistics collection service.

FQDN changed successfully

admin@mag-fs> status

Host Configuration:

  Hostname:        cloudboostappliance

  Domain:          ap-southeast-1.compute.internal

  FQDN:            cloudboostappliance.ap-southeast-1.compute.internal

Version Information:

  Version:         3.6.5

  Revision:        72dc0c4a

Network Interfaces:

             name            mode         address         netmask

             ----            ----         -------         -------

             eth0            dhcp       10.0.2.32   255.255.255.0

Network Routes:

           prefix         netmask         gateway

           ------         -------         -------

          default         0.0.0.0 ip-10-0-2-1.ap-

         10.0.2.0   255.255.255.0               *

DNS Configuration

  DNS Servers:     10.0.0.2

Appliance status: Not yet registered

admin@mag-fs>

3.       Register and Configure CloudBoost appliance in the EMC Cloud Portal

Login to DellEMC Cloud Portal and create a Cloud Profile pointing to the AWS account by entering proper Region, AWS Access Key ID and Secret. This shall create the required Bucket in the given AWS Region to store the backup data.

Register the CloudBoost appliance using the claim code generated via CLI

admin@mag-fs> register

Please use claim code XXXXXXX to register this device with the cloud controller.

Waiting for console to claim the code .............

Appliance successfully registered.

admin@mag-fs>

Enter the claim code in the Cloud Portal and verify the status

admin@mag-fs> status

Host Configuration:

  Hostname:        cloudboostappliance

  Domain:          ap-southeast-1.compute.internal

  FQDN:            cloudboostappliance.ap-southeast-1.compute.internal

Version Information:

  Version:         3.6.5

  Revision:        72dc0c4a

Network Interfaces:

             name            mode         address         netmask

             ----            ----         -------         -------

             eth0            dhcp       10.0.2.32   255.255.255.0

Network Routes:

           prefix         netmask         gateway

           ------         -------         -------

          default         0.0.0.0 ip-10-0-2-1.ap-

         10.0.2.0   255.255.255.0               *

DNS Configuration

  DNS Servers:     10.0.0.2

Appliance status: Registered, Not yet configured

admin@mag-fs>

Once registered, it will be visible on Cloud Portal

Configure the appliance by providing necessary information as shown below

Once completed, verify the status

admin@mag-fs> status

Host Configuration:

  Hostname:        cloudboostappliance

  Domain:          ap-southeast-1.compute.internal

  FQDN:            cloudboostappliance.ap-southeast-1.compute.internal

Version Information:

  Version:         3.6.5

  Revision:        72dc0c4a

Network Interfaces:

             name            mode         address         netmask

             ----            ----         -------         -------

             eth0            dhcp       10.0.2.32   255.255.255.0

Network Routes:

           prefix         netmask         gateway

           ------         -------         -------

          default         0.0.0.0 ip-10-0-2-1.ap-

         10.0.2.0   255.255.255.0               *

DNS Configuration

  DNS Servers:     10.0.0.2

Appliance status: Initial configuration completed

4.       Configure Networker to work with CloudBoost appliance

Set the remote mount password on the CloudBoost to be used for backup

admin@mag-fs> remote-mount-password enable YOURpassword

100% done. Status: Password changed successfully

Changing remote mount password: success

admin@mag-fs>

Use Device Configuration Wizard in Networker NMC to configure CloudBoost Device as below

You can verify that couples of S3 Buckets are created with their names starting with “mag”

5.       Perform Test Backups

Configure the Networker Policy and Workflow to backup to new Pool created above which uses CloudBoost Device

Start the Workflow to run the backup

Query the savesets and verify the Media Type

As these backups are using Source Deduplication, you can see the space savings and dedup ratio on Cloud Portal

6.       Perform Test Restore

Let us perform a test restore from the backup just taken

Here is the successful restore

As we saw, NetWorker and CloudBoost solution enables data protection for enterprise applications running in the public cloud, on-premises in the data center or both.

Hope this is helpful!