Backup Service

The CREODIAS Platform infrastructure consists of several Data Centers - main T-Mobile Piekna DCand separate offsite locations totally independent from the main DC allowing offsite secure disk-based backups. All available localizations are fully secure Tier III+ Data Centers connected by a dedicated redundant Nx10Gbps WAN connections.

Several services are available to perform backup functionalities:

Volume Storage in the remote DC - The storage volume service offers HDD volumes located in the backup DC. Such volumes can be used by customers to run a custom backup mechanism of their choice.
Backup of Volume Storage - Backups of User’s persistent volume data are performed using the OpenStack Cinder Backup module with the Ceph Backup driver.

The functionality offered includes:

Full and incremental, backups of selected volumes;
User-scriptable filesystem and application quiescing for Linux and Windows guests to guarantee consistent backups at the filesystem and application level (guarantees consistent database backups);
Snapshot-based backups of live-mounted volumes.

Backups can be launched manually from the Cloud Dashboard Volumes tab or programmatically via the REST API or OpenStack command line.
There is also a scheduler to allow for automated periodic backup schemes and backup rotation. Tenants are billed for the backup storage space used according to the Price List.

Requirments and limitations

The backup system allows for uninterrupted functioning of the User’s VMs, operating systems and applications.
A guest system agent will be preinstalled in every VM in order to allow for filesystem and application quiescing during backup. Standard quiescing consists of flushing all buffered data to disk before performing the snapshot necessary for data backup and pausing the VM-s write activities for the duration of the snapshot. Users may define custom quiescing activities to ensure backup consistency for their applications (ex. databases). This may cause a few seconds freeze to the VM being backed-up.

Thanks to the usage of incremental backups, only storage blocks that have changed since the previous backup need to be copied. Blocks are being compressed before being stored. Together, this allows for efficient usage of WAN backup bandwidth and storage space.

Billing

The Remote Storage and Backup as a Service services are billed according to GBytes used.