CREATE A BACKUP IN APOLLO CLOUD INSTALL
CREATE A BACKUP IN APOLLO CLOUD SOFTWARE
CREATE A BACKUP IN APOLLO CLOUD PROFESSIONAL

CREATE A BACKUP IN APOLLO CLOUD INSTALL

“With Cloudian, I liked that I could try it in a VM and install it myself on my laptop in 15 minutes,” continues Penny.

CREATE A BACKUP IN APOLLO CLOUD PROFESSIONAL

“The other commercial solution was also very complex, double the cost of Cloudian, and required professional services to install.” “Open source was massively more complex, with more hardware, and we had significant concerns about the management difficulties this would create,” says Penny. With this in mind, Penny and his team evaluated Cloudian, another commercial object storage solution, and an open source offering. That same environment would also serve as the backup target. “Fortunately, we never faced this situation, but we knew we had to make a change.” Cloudian Outshines Other Storage OptionsĪ key objective was finding a solution that would allow the index data to be moved from the media servers to a robust, fault tolerant, shared storage environment. “We wouldn’t be able to continue backing up data, access backups or conduct restores until we replaced the hardware and spun up the system again, a process which could have taken weeks,” explains Penny. Because the backup and index data was maintained by the individual media servers, if a media server were to go down, it would disrupt the backup/restore process for that device, impacting all backup and restore operations.

CREATE A BACKUP IN APOLLO CLOUD SOFTWARE

Prior to making the switch to Cloudian, the university employed SAN-based hardware as backup targets for ten media servers (each with 13 x 16 TB LUNs) with backup software provided by Commvault. Their responsibilities include providing backup for all home directories, corporate systems and research data (including HPC data) in a mixed environment encompassing Windows, VMware and Lustre. The university has three data centers which are managed by Systems Specialist Mark Penny and his team. Founded in 1921, today it has more than 20,000 students and 4,000 faculty and staff members. The University of Leicester is a leading university in the UK committed to international excellence, world-changing research and high quality, inspirational teaching. Ultimately, after fully implementing the Cloudian-based solution across its three data centers, the IT team expects to save approximately 25% in data storage costs.

By doing so, the University not only eliminated the single point of failure but also cut its storage space requirements by 50% and simplified its backup process. Recognizing that the University needed a better solution, the team decided to deploy Cloudian’s HyperStore S3-compatible object storage system as the foundation of a revamped backup platform. However, with the storage architecture it had in place, the loss of a single media server would have resulted in a total lack of access to backup data or restores, potentially for weeks while the IT team acquired and installed new hardware. Entrusted with protecting the data of nearly 30,000 users, the University of Leicester employs a Commvault-based backup infrastructure.

Create a backup in apollo cloud