Prioritizing Data Protection with ivision Cloud
Data protection is a critical component of any IT business plan, as data loss or system failure is not a question of “if” but “when.” At ivision, we offer multiple data protection services for Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). To accomplish this, we employ products like CommVault, Veeam, Rubrik, Rapid Recovery, VMware SRM and Zerto. While the products listed can do backups and disaster recovery, they each have their respective strong points and fill specific needs. Primarily, we use CommVault, Veeam and Rubrik for backups and data protection. Zerto, SRM and Rapid Recovery are better suited for Disaster Recovery.
A recent review of our architecture shows that the products we employ protect the following:
- Zerto – 1195 VMs as 1031TB of data
- CommVault – 1,472 Servers protecting 1,770.559 PB of data
- Veeam – 1,957 Servers
- Rubrik – 155 servers protecting 566.8 TB of data
Backup as a Service (BaaS)
As ransomware becomes a more prominent part of everyday life, it should be no surprise that the problem has directly impacted our clients, making backups a must for reliability and security! Clients generally possess a local copy of their backup data, which is copied to ivision for redundancy. Alternatively, some larger clients leverage AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle for a secondary redundant destination rather than ivsion storage. The cloud provider will have an archive option to move older data after a specified period into cold/deep storage as a cost-saving measure for the client.
Many cloud providers and storage vendors offer immutability, preventing any backup data from being changed or deleted by any bad actors. Future backups will ultimately require immutable storage to be configured as the backup destination.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
Due to the increase in ransomware and disaster recovery (DR), tests are essential to IT resiliency. We predominantly use Zerto for our DRaaS customers. With new releases come new challenges, and with the recent release of Zerto 9.5, we saw some issues that would impact our customers. After testing, post-upgrade, we noticed that networks were not getting appropriately attached to virtual machines (VMs) post-failover. We investigated what could be done and opted to create scripts to test post-failover and fix the issues causing problems.
In doing so, we successfully executed a DR test for one of our largest customers with no networking issues at all. This has cost manhours due to issues with older versions of VM tools. The script utilized VMware’s Power CLI, Zerto’s API wrapper and some additional PowerShell to test post-fix using commands on our FortiGate firewalls. The script looks at a virtual protection group’s current config and network settings, logs into vCenter and changes the failed over VMs. Once the changes have been made, it reaches out to the FortiGate and pings the IP’s that it got from Zerto’s configuration. After completion, it gives a summary showing what was successful.
In summary, 2022 was a busy year for the ivision Cloud team, and there appears to be no let-up in the foreseeable future. We look forward to the challenges ahead and expanding our expertise and team in 2023. Check out our cloud capabilities to get started today.
