Accenture white paper : Disaster Recovery with Amazon Web Services

Disaster Recovery with Amazon Web Services:

A Technical Guide
The paper covers

1. Define the challenges that enterprises face in adopting public cloud solutions for disaster recovery.

2. Describe the value that large enterprises can gain by adopting cloud-based DR with services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) for disaster recovery.

3. Provide recommended disaster recovery architecture patterns.

http://www.accenture.com/microsite/reinvent-2013/Documents/Accentue-Smart-Disaster-Recovery-with-Amazon-Web-Services.pdf

Tape to AWS Glacier using VTL

Spectrum Data, who are the tape backup and archive to the global oil and gas industry offers tape to AWS Glacier migration tools. 

Customer map is here: http://www.spectrumdata.com.au/images/general-corporate/global-map_2012_web-version_v1.png

They have integrated with the new AWS VTL support:

http://www.spectrumdata.com.au/total-data-management-solutions/vault-and-cloud-storage/cloud-storage

AWS Storage Tiering for Enterprise Workloads

This a replay of the AWS reInvent session that covers storage tiering options for running Oracle Enterprise workloads such as Oracle Databases on AWS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5Il80bhQCI

Slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/tomlaszewski/aws-storage-tiering-for-enterprise-workloads

Tape migration to AWS Glacier

Here is a new offering from CA that bundles Riverbed software and AWS Glacier to provide the capability to move tape to AWS Glacier for long term archiving:

https://portal.reinvent.awsevents.com/connect/search.ww#loadSearch-searchPhrase=&searchType=session&tc=0&sortBy=daytime&dayID=32&p=&i(10007)=10020&i(10007)=10024

AWS re:Invent enterprise sessions

DAT202 - Using Amazon RDS to Power Enterprise Applications Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it cheap and easy to deploy, manage, and scale relational databases using a familiar MySQL, Oracle or MS SQL server database engine. Amazon RDS can be an excellent choice for running many large, off-the-shelf enterprise applications from companies like JD Edwards, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and Siebel. Sign up for this session to learn how to best leverage Amazon RDS for use with enterprise applications and learn about best practices and data migration strategies.

DAT401 - Advanced Data Migration Techniques for Amazon RDS Migrating data from the existing environments to AWS is a key part of the overall migration to Amazon RDS for most customers. Moving data into Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) from existing production systems in a reliable, synchronized manner with minimum downtime requires careful planning and the use appropriate tools and technologies. Because each migration scenario is different in terms of source and target systems, tools, and data sizes, you'll need to customize your data migration strategy to achieve the best outcome. In this session we will do a deep dive into various methods, tools and technologies that can be put to use for a successful and timely data migration to Amazon RDS.

STG301 - AWS Storage Tiers for Enterprise Workloads - Best Practices Enterprise environments utilize many different kinds of storage technologies from different vendors to fulfill various needs in their IT landscape. These are often very expensive and procurement cycles quite lengthy. They also need specialized expertise in each vendor's storage technologies to configure them and integrate them into the ecosystem, again resulting in prolonged project cycles and added cost. AWS provides end-to-end storage solutions that will fulfill all these needs of Enterprise Environments that are easily manageable, extremely cost effective, fully integrated and totally on demand. These storage technologies include Elastic Block Store (EBS) for instance attached block storage, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for object (file) storage and Amazon Glacier for archival. An enterprise database environment is an excellent example of a system that could use all these storage technologies to implement an end-to-end solution using striped PIOPS volumes for data files, Standard EBS volumes for log files, S3 for database backup using Oracle Secure Backup and Glacier for long-time archival from S3 based on time lapse rules. In this session, we will explore the best practices for utilizing AWS storage tiers for enterprise workloads

STG305 - Disaster Recovery Site on AWS - Minimal Cost Maximum Efficiency Implementation of  disaster recovery (DR) site is crucial for business continuity of any enterprise. Due to the fundamental nature of features like elasticity, scalability and geographic distribution, DR implementation on AWS can be done at 10-50% of the conventional cost. In this session, we will do a deep dive into proven DR architectures on AWS and best practices, tools and techniques get the most out of them.

STG303 - Running Microsoft and Oracle Stacks on Elastic Block Store Run your Enterprise applications on Elastic Block Store (EBS). This session will discuss how you can leverage the block storage platform (EBS) as you move your Microsoft (SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint) and Oracle (Databases, E-business Suite, Business Intelligence) workloads onto Amazon Web Services (AWS). The session will cover high availability, performance, and backup/restore best practices

ENT303 - Migrating Enterprise Applications to AWS - Best Practices, Tools and Techniques In this session we will discuss strategies, tools and techniques for migrating enterprise software systems to AWS. We'll consider applications like Oracle eBusiness Suite, SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel. These applications are complex by themselves; they are frequently customized; they have many touch points on other systems in the enterprise; and they often have large associated databases. Nevertheless, running enterprise applications in the cloud affords powerful benefits. We'll identify success factors and best practices.

AWS storage performance

A common question is "How would the client compare the performance of storage on Amazon vs. local data center? "  Well here are some numbers for AWS storage:

a.   Instance storage Disk : Equivalent to local disk for a server

b.   Instance storage SSD

                                                             i.     ~120,000 random read IOPS (4 KB blocks)

                                                            ii.     ~10,000-85,000 random write IOPS (4 KB blocks)

c.    EBS Standard (100 IOPS)

                                                             i.     Reads typically <20ms writes typically <10ms

                                                            ii.     Best effort to 10’s of MB/sec

d.   EBS PIOPS (4K IOPS),

                                                             i.     On best effort, you may get up to 40 MB/sec throughput for 2K PIOPS disk

e.   S3 : loading :http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/05/aws-s3-load-throughput.html

f.     Glacier : Long time archiving. Takes 3-5 hours to retrieve.

g.   Storage Gateway : On premise to AWS S3 ‘replication’.  So, will depend on the pipe (internet, AWS DirectConnect) from on premise to AWS.

AWS Storage options, cost, and SLA

A common question when moving from on premise to AWS is what are the storage options
 and how much they will cost.  A great place to calculate the cost is the Simple Monthly Calculator: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html. 

Before you can calculate the cost you need to be aware of the options, cost of each option, when to use it, and SLAs:

a.   EBS: http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/ec2/ : Data Transfer, EBS standard and EBS PIOPS. Sample pricing:

                                                             i.     Data Transfer, EBS Standard, EBS PIOPS : http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/ebs/

                                                            ii.     Price is for allocated storage

                                                          iii.     SLA : annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume

                                                          iv.     Common use cases: RDBMS (PIOPS), Application Server files (IOPS)

b.   S3 : http://aws.amazon.com/pricing/s3/

                                                             i.     First TB per month of storage: .095

                                                            ii.     Data transfer : Up to 10 TB .120 per GB + request prices (.005 per 1K requests)

                                                          iii.     Price is for used storage

                                                          iv.     SLA: 99.999999999% durability, 99.99% availability

                                                           v.     Common use cases: backups, multi media content, web logs, EMR jobs

c.    Glacier: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/

                                                             i.     First TB per month of storage: .01

                                                            ii.     Price is for used storage

                                                          iii.     SLA: 99.999999999% durability

                                                          iv.     Common use cases: archiving, long term storage

d.   Instance storage : Included in price of instance

                                                             i.     Common use cases: web server files (instance disk storage), data warehouses (Redshift runs on instance storage), RDBMS (instance SSD..with redundancy), temporary files

Disaster recovery in the cloud options

These are by all means not all the options, but at a high level these are the common options:

• Backup and restore - Have to set up security groups set up and set up Route53. Data is not being mirrored or replication. You are doing an import and export from database to S3. When system goes down then resource S3 data to the database. You also have to provision AMIs.
• Pilot light – In this case, you are doing Data mirroring/replication from source system to DR site. Could run GoldenGate. The EC2 instances are present but stopped. Have to prepare all required resources from automatic start – AMIS, network settings, load balancing etc.
• Fully working low capacity standby – Blurring lines between HA and DR. In this case have an issue with RDS as the data needs to replicated both ways as traffic could go to either configuration.
• Multi-site hot standby – production load on both sides. Cost and data sync are the biggest challenges.

AWS Glacier UI

Amazon AWS Glacier was just introduced but there are already a number of free Windows UI tools to use.  I just used this one to backup my laptop files to Glacier. http://fastglacier.com/