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Backup for Cloud and Object Storage

Do you back up your cloud and object storage regularly? Hard disk-based object storage and cloud services are considered highly available. But high availability does not automatically mean data protection.

Risks

Data growth is unabated, and data has long since become one of companies' most valuable assets. In this context, data protection is often neglected, even though a loss of data is associated with economic consequences.

Object Storage Icon

Object storage is becoming increasingly popular, as it offers many advantages, especially for unstructured data from analytics and IoT applications:

 

Erasure coding and integrated replication functions in particular ensure the high availability of object storage systems. Thus, failures of individual components can usually be well compensated.

Nevertheless, even for object storage, there are the known dangers against which storage systems should always be protected. These are, for example:

 

Conclusion: When it comes to object storage, human errors in particular, such as accidental deletion of data, or malware attacks threaten data security. These factors can destroy large data sets and lead to their irretrievable loss.

Data protection for object storage

A backup increases data protection and availability, especially if the backup is available as a 1:1 copy of the data. This also applies to object storage, despite its high availability.

A reliable backup for object storage systems must meet several criteria:

Use Case: Backup for Object Storage with Cloudian HyperStore and PoINT Archival Gateway

Object Storage Backup with PoINT Archival Gateway

The Cloudian HyperStore object storage systems allow a so-called Cross Region Replication to an external target:

 

The tape-based S3 object storage PoINT Archival Gateway is perfectly suited as replication target and backup storage for your valuable data. Using Cross Region Replication, the software automatically receives the data copy and stores it on tape:

 

Case Study PostFinance AG

The Swiss financial institution PostFinance AG has more than 1 PB of data saved to a highly available hard drive-based object storage system. In order to improve its data security, PostFinance adopted an automatic data replication solution using the tape-based PoINT Archival Gateway. Data is replicated automatically and redundantly to two independent tape libraries.

Thanks to the PoINT Archival Gateway's native S3 API, the solution integrates seamlessly into the company's existing infrastructure. Most importantly, it means that PostFinance has easy access to the backup in case of emergency. The PoINT Archival Gateway is fully capable of flexibly expanding the system’s current capacity of 2.4 PB without relying on any individual vendor.

For further details please see our case study.

Case Study PostFinance AG
Case Study EMBL-EBI / PoINT Archival Gateway

Case Study EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)

EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) stores research data and compressed data of less than 1MB up to 100GB in size, with a current dataset of approximately 50PB. Backup and long-term archiving data is written to tape. The previous in-house solution wrote the data from object storage to a disk file system and then to tape media. However, this approach did not provide sufficient performance for the growing data volumes. Moreover only 90% of the tape’s capacity was utilized.

With the introduction of PoINT Archival Gateway, the research institute now has a high-performance and cost-effective solution to write data directly to tape via the standardized S3 interface and to cope with the data growth.

For further details please see our case study.

PoINT Archival Gateway enables seamless integration of tape libraries as additional S3 storage class via the standardized S3 REST API.

 

Further information about PoINT Archival Gateway can be found here.

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