Recently at Amazon re:Invent, DellEMC announced Cloud Snapshot Manager (CSM), the first iteration of an enterprise grade data protection control portal for native cloud snapshots.
What’s important about CSM is that it’s not trying to re-invent the wheel – it’s not about hacking a new snapshot protocol into third party clouds like Amazon, but leveraging the existing tools. How is this different from a roll your own snapshot script, then? Well, it all comes down to how you want to manage your snapshots – hence the name. CSM is about giving you a true, enterprise grade data protection overlay to the native snapshot functionality, letting you set policies around snapshot frequencies, retention times, and instance selection.
Now, you might think it’s odd that I’m talking about snapshots – why wouldn’t we be trying to back this up? Well, just because we move into the public cloud it doesn’t mean we abandon a data protection continuum. Remember the continuum from my previous post:
Backup and recovery in public cloud serves a purpose, but just like for on-premises systems, you’ll sometimes want faster recoverability options than a traditional backup will give you; or (and this is something particular to PaaS in particular within the cloud) you’ll want to be able to provide protection against something that you can’t necessarily deploy a traditional backup option against. Hence, just as they are within the datacentre, snapshots can form an important part of a holistic data protection strategy in the public cloud.
CSM lets you define snapshot policies, perform ad-hoc snapshots, and perform snapshot recoveries, all from within an easy to use web portal hosted within the DellEMC cloud. Instances can be protected by selection or tagging – and most importantly, CSM regularly rediscovers your environment, so changing moving protected systems between layers of snapshot policies can be as simple as changing instance tags.
CSM was in interactive development for some time, with a lot of customers making use of it. It brings two distinct benefits – enterprise management, of course, but also allowing policy-based removal of snapshots as they expire. This can pay for itself in eliminating the risk of bill-bloat as snapshots get taken, but not cleaned up. By managing the snapshots from a central location, you keep a tighter control over the bill that comes from the storage associated with those snapshots.
If your business is using public cloud, Cloud Snapshot Manager is something you, as a data protection administrator, really should be looking into. And the cool thing about that is you can do it with a 30 day free trial. Because there’s nothing to install, it’s as simple as signing up to a portal to get started. Currently CSM works with Amazon Web Services – if you’re interested, you should check out the official page on CSM for more details.