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Anyone familiar with TwinStrata CloudArray?

J

joshu

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 11, 2011
Messages
160
I'm investigating offsite backup solutions for my upcoming esxi setup and I came across this virtual appliance by TwinStrata called CloudArray. Apparently it can work in conjunction with Veeam Backup and Replication and Amazon S3 to offer offsite secure backups. There's even a free version for Veeam customers.

At a glance one thing I don't understand is whether the virtual appliance sends the backup data to TwinStrata as an intermediary before reaching S3.

Anyone have any experience backing up ESXi environments with this product?
 
The TwinStrata appliance serves as a local landing area for the backups and can be targeted directly by Veeam. The appliance then automatically copies the backups off to the cloud. This will give you locally accessible backups and an offsite copy.
 
Joshu – Full disclosure - I'm with TwinStrata

Short answer - Yes, CloudArray is an intermediary, as you described it.

Long answer - We're a SAN device (iSCSI) with a back-end in the cloud. The appliance is installed on-premise using local storage for performance. For back-up, that local storage would be equal to what you put in the cloud. You mount the volume on your Veeam server (just as you would any other volume) and then use it as the primary target of your backups. In the background we encrypt, compress and asynchronously replicate with the cloud.

Greg
 
GGKettmann said:
Joshu – Full disclosure - I'm with TwinStrata

Short answer - Yes, CloudArray is an intermediary, as you described it.

Long answer - We're a SAN device (iSCSI) with a back-end in the cloud. The appliance is installed on-premise using local storage for performance. For back-up, that local storage would be equal to what you put in the cloud. You mount the volume on your Veeam server (just as you would any other volume) and then use it as the primary target of your backups. In the background we encrypt, compress and asynchronously replicate with the cloud.

Greg
Click to expand...

HI Greg, thanks for the information! So, just to be clear is the data transmitted directly from the on-premise appliance to let's say Amazon S3 without going through TwinStrata?
 
Correct. The data goes directly from the CloudArray appliance to the Cloud Storage Provider, such as Amazon.

Greg
 
I forget the details but when I looked into this is was expensive for SMB sector.
 
They offer a virtual appliance for free but not 1TB of cloud storage. My issue with the concept of twinstrata is I don't want to pay more per GB for offsite long term storage than I do for the onsite production san. Went back to tapes :/
 
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The free appliance "Handles up to 1TB of data in the cloud", so as you said you still have to pay for 1TB of cloud storage.

Regarding the cost I haven't done any calculations, but if you use something like Veeam B&R and you backup say ~220 GB worth of VMs, the amount of data transferred to Amazon S3 through CloudArray will be ~20 GB. Source
 
Yes if you have a small environment it is a good solution. My veeam deduped backups use about 1.7TB for 14 days of retention. Now compound that with our 7 year retention requirement.
 
For organizations who are looking for more predictable cloud storage costs and/or have more than a TB of data to back up, we’ve introduced a monthly subscription. For a flat fee of $0.19/GB/Mo (increments of 1TB required), you get the appliance and the cloud storage. There are no other fees.

For our customers, justification of cloud storage is both about recoverability and cost, and cost justification is more about what’s being replaced (tape, offsite, etc.) than the size of the data. In addition to eliminating tape and its associated manual processes, using cloud storage for backup also enables you to rapidly regain access to your data in the event of a disaster because a CloudArray appliance can be re-instantiated in minutes in an alternate (or even cloud-based) location.

Greg
 
Greg I am happy that you are updating on this tread. I have some questions on cloud backup that I hope you can answer. Regarding backing up a server what kind of compression do you typically see? Our nightly differentials are about 20gb coming out of Veeam deduped.

Restore - can the server be started immediately after the appliance is re-instantiated or does the entire VM have to be downloaded before it can be started.
 
We expect a further 28-50% data reduction after whatever Veeam provides. If you send us 20GB we'll expect 10GB-15GB in the cloud.

You can boot immediately, although there may be delays due to bandwidth. The key point is that you won't have to download the whole image first. You can sort of boot off of the cloud and we'll load the local cache as data blocks become available.
 
Greg is the encryption provided by CloudArray HIPAA certified or vetted by any independent security professionals? Any way to decrypt without the CloudArray appliance?

How are the backup files named on the cloud provider's storage, e.g. on Amazon S3 are backups stored within a bucket and within that bucket are file names scrabbled, so the actual VMs stored cannot be deciphered?

You can boot immediately, although there may be delays due to bandwidth. The key point is that you won't have to download the whole image first. You can sort of boot off of the cloud and we'll load the local cache as data blocks become available.
Click to expand...

In a disaster recovery situation what is the minimum setup required to retrieve backups from the cloud and have them powered up? Assuming a bare metal server and I've installed ESXi. Is it enough to redeploy the CloudArray or is Veeam B&R also required?
 
CloudArray uses AES-256 bit encryption, complaint with the IEEE 1619.1 standard. The CloudArray appliance is required for decryption.

Backup files are a function of the backup software (Veeam). We are a block level device and have no visibility into the file system. We store blocks, or groups of blocks, in the cloud.

In a disaster you'd provide a host, download and instantiate CloudArray and then recover the Veeam B&R server. Then you could recreate your machine images. For file server volumes, presented by CloudArray, recreate a file server for immediate access to your files.

Greg
 
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