Introduction to Zmanda Backup and Recovery Solutions

Last week we shared a post highlighting the new data archival and management console features. This week, we are sharing a new set of support features for AWS and Azure.

The biggest change will be coming to Amanda Enterprise, a product of Zmanda that combines; fast installation, simplified management, enterprise-class functionality, and low-cost subscription fees.

With new clients and capabilities, this release of Amanda Enterprise 4.0 makes it one of the most anticipated releases yet.

What Updates Are Coming to AWS and Azure Support?

Azure Storage Support:

Microsoft’s Azure Storage, the novel cloud storage solution for modern data storage scenarios, offers a massively scalable object store for a file system service for the cloud, data objects, a NoSQL store, and a messaging store for reliable messaging.

Azure Storage is durable and highly available as the redundancy ensures that the data is safe in the event of transient hardware failures, unexpected outrage, or natural disasters. Encryption of all the data in Azure Storage makes it more secure.

Also, the data stored in Azure Storage is accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. All these features make Azure an obvious storage option for many customers.

The excellent news is Amanda Enterprise 4.0 will support Azure storage as the end storage device to backup and restore the data. We use the Blob storage option of Azure and support Hot/Cool tiers. Azure’s Blob storage is optimized to store massive amounts of unstructured data like binary data or text. It is ideal for storing files for distributed access, storing data for backup and restore, for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service, disaster recovery, and archiving.

Customers can also choose to move their data to Archive storage using Lifecycle rules.

AWS Glacier Support:

Amazon S3 Glacier, a particular storage class of Amazon S3, is an exceptionally low-cost storage service that provides flexible, secure, and flexible storage for data backup and archival.

In short, AWS Glacier is optimized for data that is not used frequently or best referred to as “cold data”. It provides average annual durability of 99.999999999 percent and can store an unlimited amount of data in it.

Customers can store their data for $0.004 per gigabyte per month with AWS Glacier. No headaches of capacity planning, hardware provisioning, data replication, hardware failure detection, and repair, or time-consuming hardware migrations, AWS does it all.

Until AE 3.6, Zmanda only supported storing data to AWS S3 storage. Amanda Enterprise was not providing support to move data to Glacier’s storage. With 4.0, we have introduced support for Lifecycle rules creation using Amanda Enterprise that will move the data from AWS S3 storage to Glacier storage.

Also, Amanda Enterprise 4.0 can restore the data that has been moved to Glacier storage.

This feature will help customer to store their infrequently used data to low-cost storage and reduce the overall cost of data storage.

Be sure to check out our how-to videos for Where to Find Login Details for ZRM (MySQL Backup) on AWS and Where to Find Login Details for ZRM (MySQL Backup) on Azure.

Data Archival:

The process of moving data that is no longer active to a separate storage device for longer retention is termed as data archival. This process reduces the cost of primary storage. Data archiving takes a number of different forms like online data storage (where archive data is placed on disk systems), offline storage (where archive data is written on tapes), and cloud storage (those offered by Amazon).

Amanda Enterprise 4.0 will provide data lifecycle rules to move the data from primary storage options to archive storage options. In other words, customers can define when to move their data to be archived and to where. As a result:

Cost Savings – Save high storage costs with increasing data.

Reduced Primary Storage Capacity – Archiving minimizes the amount of data getting backed up to primary storage; this increases the performance of backup and recovery tasks.

Policy-Driven – Automatically move the data to archival storage beyond its retention period in primary storage.

What Comes Next for 4.0?  

Subscribe and get real-time updates on new features and offers sent directly to your email.  New release updates sent directly to your email. Also, visit backup.zmanda.com/v4 to learn more about the new features that are coming with 4.0.

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Part one of a series of blogs to highlight the new features that are coming to Zmanda 4.0. The new software update is coming soon and here are some of the features that are coming along with it.

Central Management Console for Managing Multiple Backup Servers

A central management console helps deploy backup tasks to multiple terminal machines from a single console while running and monitoring backups on all systems easily.

Backups Can Be Overwhelming If You Don’t Have the Right Tools 

Managing backups of hundreds of machines across multiple locations is a tedious and time-consuming task, even for the most experienced IT administrators. This normally involves managing multiple backup servers and data storage systems. Maintaining consistent rules, schedules, and notifications across multiple backup servers is not only time-consuming but also repetitive.

How Does Amanda Enterprise 4.0 Fix This Problem? 

IT teams are looking for tools to help take away monotonous tasks and simplify workflows. By consolidating the management console, Amanda Enterprise 4.0 will help save time and resources.

What are the Benefits?

1. License deployment, configuration, and ongoing management of all backup servers across multiple locations can be done via a centralized management console
2. Share backup rules across all the backups and backup sets
3. Configure alerts and notifications for all backups from a single portal
4. Monitor and manage the health of all the backups, traffic utilization and detailed reports all from a single pane 

Also, be sure to check out Rutgers Case Study: How the University Saved Tens of Thousands of Dollars

Data Archival Rules 

What is Data Archival? 

As the business grows, the amount of data also grows exponentially over time. Additionally, when new functionalities are introduced, like when a software upgrades to a newer version or when mergers and acquisitions happen databases expand. The system becomes redundant and backing up all the data becomes a mandate. Thus, large volumes of data result in the need for additional hardware, slowing down of systems and extra time required to restore a critical backup.

So what is the best solution? Data archival and retrieval solutions is a great first step. It automatically helps prepare responses to any compliance audit, litigation or information request for business communication data. In addition, the right data archival solution archives all communication data in one central location for easy search, and exporting needs. Master and reference data, all transactional data, as well as metadata is stored. In short, the process of moving data that is no longer actively used to a separate storage device for long-term retention is termed as data archival.

Why is Data Archival Important?

With your business growth, your data grows and so does the importance of data archival. Even defining what data archival means can be difficult to organizations as they struggle to define what data can be archived. It’s important to understand the archival process to reduce your storage costs, especially in the cloud storage era.

Types of Storage:

• Primary Storage – Frequently Accessed and Highly Available Storage Options which are more expensive and designed for performance.
• Archive Storage – Long term storage options that are less frequently accessed and less expensive compared to primary storage.

What Data Should I Archive?

You need to make it a high business priority to identify what data to archive. Any data that is no longer frequently accessed off primary storage can be moved to archive storage. The objective is to retain the data for long term, but business is tolerant to longer data retrieval times.

How Does Amanda Enterprise 4.0 Help?

Zmanda 4.0 will provide data lifecycle rules to move your data from primary storage options to archive storage options. In other words, you can define when to move your data to be archived and to where.

1. Cost Savings – As data grows, archiving it can save significant storage costs.
2. Reduced Primary Storage Capacity – Archiving reduces the amount of data getting backed up to primary storage increasing the performance of backup and recovery tasks.
3. Policy-Driven – Automatically move the data to archival storage beyond its retention period in primary storage.

What Comes Next for Zmanda 4.0?  

Subscribe and get real-time updates on new features and offers sent directly to your email.  New release updates sent directly to your email. Also, visit backup.zmanda.com/v4 to learn more about the new features that are coming with 4.0. 

Amanda Enterprise Edition Linux Client is a certified Amanda network backup software, tested and supported by Zmanda. This document has been prepared in conjunction with the Amanda Enterprise Edition Linux client 3.6 release.
Amanda Enterprise Edition Linux client packages are available for the following distributions from the Zmanda network:

• Red Hat Enterprise
• CentOS
• Fedora
• Oracle Enterprise Linux
• Debian
• Ubuntu
• SLES
• Open Suse

Please see the supported platforms matrix for exact versions of the above distributions that are supported by 3.6 release.

This document confers about the Amanda Enterprise Edition Linux client installation, configuration, and verification procedures.

To find the downloadable User Guide for Linux Clients, click here.

User manual for Linux clients-min

 

Also, be sure to check out Zmanda Recovery Manager- Quick Start-Up Guide