Since the need for a reliable data archive is well known, there’s no need for us to focus on that. Instead, we’ll discuss the various data archive options AWS offers its customers. However, we should first make an important distinction between data archives and data backups – as the purpose and function of the two should not be confused.
A data archive is for data not actively in use, but that needs to be moved to a separate storage device for preservation and retention over the long term. Besides preservation, a key goal of a data archive is to reduce the cost of storage. A data archive is not intended to help your system recover from some disaster or failure. Backups – which are performed on both active and inactive data – are designed to permit recovery from data failure.
Bearing that in mind, being able to quickly restore data from a backup medium is likely far more important than it would be for an archive. Such considerations will define the kind of ideal solutions you might choose for your data archive vs. your data backup.
However, many of these concerns simply wouldn’t apply to a data archive in the Cloud. Using AWS, for instance, means you never need to invest in a particular technology or medium, or worry about changing standards – that’s all Amazon’s headache. And your costs will always be a direct product of the services you actually use.
Of course, AWS isn’t the only player offering out-of-the-box cloud archiving services, but they’re a good place to start.
S3 and Glacier are, one way or another, the primary AWS tools you’ll use for your data archive. We’ll look at three common use-case scenarios: archives for AWS-based data, on-premise data, and hybrid data solutions.
If the application to be archived is running within the AWS environment, then integration with S3 or Glacier should be straightforward. Since a data archive doesn’t demand frequent reads, you would normally opt for the cheaper Glacier, which can require a lag of several hours for retrieval. If, however, you’re already storing some application data in S3 (like videos or application logs) and you may not want to write the extra code needed to move inactive data to Glacier, you may instead consider moving only the old, inactive data from S3 to Glacier.
AWS allows you to configure and manage the automated lifecycle of objects in your S3 buckets. You could therefore create a configuration that causes S3 objects to be moved to Glacier based on specified conditions or policies.
A sample policy may look like this:
If the components of your application (like a webserver, database, application server, and NFS server) are running within your datacenter, but you still want to use AWS for archiving your backed up data, the simplest solution is to integrate your backup server with AWS S3 or Glacier. This diagram may help you visualize the architecture:
Even if your backup server doesn’t natively support AWS cloud integration, you can still create a seamless and secure interface between your data center and AWS’s storage infrastructure using AWS Storage Gateway. Storage Gateway won’t require a dedicated network setup between your corporate network and AWS infrastructure, and it is built to support industry standard storage protocols, while storing the encrypted data in AWS S3.
In this kind of setup, an application deployed on AWS might interact with on-premise components (or the other way around). In such cases, you may want to extend an existing archiving strategy to the cloud, requiring only a reliable way to connect your two networks via either a standard VPN setup or through AWS Direct Connect, which makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premises to AWS.
Many customers will have specific data retention policies, and must often comply with regulatory guidelines. AWS Glacier offers you Vault Locks. A Vault Lock Policy allows you to apply compliance controls to the contents of any Glacier vault.
To review, here are some of the key advantages you can enjoy by archiving your data in the cloud…and with AWS in particular:
Do you have your own cloud/local archiving experience? Let us know in the comments.
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