Tag: Backups

Reduce the Cost of Backup Storage with Zerto 8.5 and Amazon S3

Gene Torres Leave a comment

When Zerto 7.0 was released with Long-Term Retention, it was only the beginning of the journey to provide what feels like traditional data protection to meet compliance/regulations for data retention in addition to the 30-day short term journal that Zerto uses for blazing fast recovery.

A few versions later, Zerto (8.5) has expanded that “local repository” to include “remote repositories” in the public cloud. Today it’s Azure blob (hot/cold), and AWS S3 (with support for Standard S3, Standard S3-IA, or Standard One Zone-IA).

And to demonstrate how to do it, I’ve created some content, which includes video and a document that walks you through the process. In the video, I even go as far as running a retention job (backup) to AWS S3, and restoring data from S3 to test the recovery experience.

The published whitepaper can be found here: https://www.zerto.com/page/deploy-configure-zerto-long-term-retention-amazon-s3/

Update: I have just completed testing with S3 Bucket Encryption using Amazon S3 key (SSE-E3), and the solution works without any changes to the IAM policy (https://github.com/gjvtorres/Zerto-LTR-IAM-Policy). There are two methods to encrypt the S3 bucket, with Amazon S3 key as the first option (recommended), and AWS Key Management Service key (SSE-KMS) as the other. I suggest taking a look at the following AWS document that provides pricing examples of both methods. According to what I’ve found, you can cut cost by up to 99% by using the Amazon S3 key. So go ahead, give it a read!

https://aws.amazon.com/kms/pricing/

Now for the fun stuff…

The first option I have is the YouTube video below (or you can watch on my YouTube channel) .

I’ve also started branching out to live streaming of some of the work I’m doing on my Twitch channel.

If you find the information useful, I’d really appreciate a follow on both platforms, and hey, enable the notifications so when I post new content or go live, you can get notified and participate. I’m always working on producing new content, and feedback is definitely helpful to make sure I’m doing something that is beneficial for the community.

So, take a look, and let me know what you think. Please share, because information’s only useful if those who are looking for it are made aware.

Cheers!

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Using the AWS Storage Gateway to Backup to S3 using Zerto

Gene Torres Leave a comment

This one took a while to get out there, but alas, it has been published for public consumption.

With that, I’m happy to be able to share this new whitepaper with the community, as it was not only great to hear that Zerto supports it, but it was also a blast testing and documenting the solution!

As a part of the Zerto 8.0 launch earlier this year (March 22, 2020 to be exact), the AWS Storage Gateway was officially announced as being supported as a Zerto LTR (Long Term Retention/Backup) target, which effectively enables you to send your Zerto backups to Amazon S3.

Sure, as of Zerto 8.5, you can actually configure Azure Blob (Hot/Cold) Storage or Amazon S3 (with Infrequent Access Tier support) for Zerto backups, which will effectively enable you to send backups directly to the public clouds via HTTPs.

That said, where does the AWS Storage Gateway fit into the picture? When or why should I use it as opposed to sending my backups directly to the cloud?

In a nutshell, the difference between what Zerto does in 8.5, and what you get by using the AWS Storage Gateway is that with the storage gateway, you are getting a cached copy of your backup data on-premises, which resides outside of Zerto’s short term journal. Here’s how that topology looks:

Topology for the AWS Storage Gateway in a Zerto Environment

What we see here is that the Storage Gateway sits on-premises, and serves as a cache location for most frequently accessed data. You connect it to Zerto as an NFS or SMB repository (SMB must be used for indexing, btw) and configure your Virtual Protection Groups to send backups to this repository.

What you will get is a Zerto backup that will complete locally, and then the Storage Gateway asynchronously replicates that data out to an S3 bucket of your choosing. If you need to restore something from the backups (if your short term journal doesn’t contain what you need), you can quickly restore that data from the storage gateway without having to pull the data back down from S3.

Now that I’ve set the stage – without further ado (yeah I googled this to be sure I used the correct term), here’s the link to the whitepaper: https://bit.ly/2Krs14y

As an added bonus, if you are strapped for time and don’t want to read, I’ve also created a video that walks through the same steps to install and configure the AWS Storage Gateway for use with Zerto:

If you have found this useful, please be social and share! As usual, thanks for reading, and watching. Please leave any comments and questions below!

Cheers!

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