Rapid Recovery 6.6 - User Guide

Secure cloud accounts for US Government

United States federal, state, and local government agencies and their partners have access to increasing cloud account options. Rapid Recovery supports the following offerings for Government and related cloud accounts:

• AWS GovCloud (US). Amazon Web Services offers a service called AWS GovCloud (US). This is an isolated AWS region designed to meet specific regulatory and compliance requirements. Using this service lets United States government agencies and customers join private businesses in leveraging cloud accounts. Rapid Recovery supports archiving to Amazon S3 storage accounts in the AWS GovCloud.
• Azure Government. Azure Government is a United States government-only cloud platform exclusively for US federal, state, local, and tribal government agencies and their partners. Rapid Recovery supports Azure Government in the same manner that we offer standard Azure support. For example:
  • Rapid Recovery supports archiving to Azure Government and standard Azure storage accounts.
  • Rapid Recovery supports virtual export to an Azure virtual machine (one-time, or virtual standby) on public and Azure Government platforms.
  • Rapid Recovery supports running a Rapid Recovery Core in an Azure VM in the AWS GovCloud or in a standard Azure account.
  • Rapid Recovery supports replication from a source Core (running on-premises or in the AWS GovCloud) to an Azure VM target Core. If your source Core is located in the AWS GovCloud, your replication target must also run in the AWS GovCloud.

Balancing access time, cost and convenience for archiving to cloud accounts

To offer our users cost-effective cloud archiving and virtual export options, Rapid Recovery continues to expand support of cloud storage providers (and storage classes for leading providers that offer them). Educated users can leverage policies to balance data archive convenience, data access time, and cost.

When considering strategies for archiving or exporting to the cloud, Rapid Recovery users are encouraged to understand the tradeoffs between initial cost to store data, how frequently the data is expected to be used, the need to access that data within a prescribed period of time, and costs associated with retrieving the data.

Some providers (such as Amazon S3) offer different storage classes. Choosing the correct storage class can save you money if your assumptions regarding these factors are accurate. Quest recommends that Rapid Recovery users review data storage policies at least once annually to ensure you are using your resources effectively. Similarly, administrators are cautioned to review the data being archived or exported to cloud accounts so you can update planning assumptions and migrate data accordingly.

The act of storing data, for some vendors, is extremely low or in some cases free. However, cloud service providers often apply charges to your account when you access or retrieve that data. There are often different fees based on how quickly you need to access the data. In some cases, using more expensive storage (such as Amazon S3 standard) is more cost effective if you plan to restore from recovery points than if you store data in Glacier and need to restore.

Amazon lets you define data life cycle policies that move data between Amazon S3 storage classes over time. For example, you could store freshly uploaded data using the Standard storage class, move it to Standard – Infrequent Access 30 days later, and then to Reduced Redundancy Storage after another 60 days have passed. You can also explicitly archive data for any type of Amazon S3 cloud account to Glacier, using the Archive Wizard. This is recommended if data recovery is expected very infrequently. Before selecting this option, familiarize yourself with fees related to access, storage age, and so on. See the topic Amazon storage options and archiving.

Some Rapid Recovery features are designed specifically for the cloud. If performing virtual export to the cloud using Azure, consider virtual standby. This process lets you create a fully bootable virtual machine in the Azure cloud. The VM files are continually updated with newly captured recovery points. Unlike virtual standby performed on-premises, the VM files are not deployed into a bootable VM until or unless you need them. Your initial cost for virtual standby in Azure involve only storage. Compute costs (which in Azure can be considerable in the long term) are incurred only if the VM is deployed, which is required to spin up a VM and perform a restore.

You can run a Rapid Recovery Core in an Azure VM. You can also replicate an on-premises Core to a VM in the Azure cloud, or replicate a source Core in Azure to a target Core in Azure. Running a source or target Rapid Recovery Core in Azure uses compute resources for the active Core VM, and requires storage accounts to be created and associated with each Core VM for your repository, which incurs storage costs. For information about setting up a Core to run in Azure, see the Rapid Recovery Azure Setup Guide.

Users of Rapid Recovery that employ cloud storage options are encouraged to understand the tradeoffs between initial cost to store data, the need to access that data within a prescribed period of time, and costs associated with retrieving the data.

For example, the act of storing data, for some vendors, is extremely low or in some cases free. However, cloud service providers often apply charges to your account when you access or retrieve that data. There are often different fees based on how quickly you need to access the data. In some cases, using more expensive storage (such as Amazon S3 standard) is more cost effective if you plan to restore from recovery points than if you store data in Glacier and need to restore.

Amazon lets you define data life cycle policies that move data between Amazon S3 storage classes over time. For example, you could store freshly uploaded data using the Standard storage class, move it to Standard – IA 30 days later, and then to Amazon Glacier after another 60 days have passed.