Nakivo Backup & Replication storing backups to AWS

With Nakivo Backup & Replication you can store backups to AWS (Amazon Web Services) Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) environment.

This solution increase the data protection allowing the administrators to follow the 321 backup rule. Having at least one copy of your critical backups offsite you can save your data in case of a local disaster.

Prerequisites

In order to backup your VMs to Amazon cloud, you need to configure the AWS environment first:

To access the Amazon cloud from Nakivo you need to create a dedicated User from the AWS IAM Console. A IAM (Identity and Access Management) user is used to control who can use your AWS resources (authentication) and what resources they can use and in what ways (authorization).

Create a Group (i.e. NakivoBackup), assign the Users membership and attach the requested Policies to grant specific permissions to access the EC2 instance.

Configure Nakivo for AWS

To establish the connection with an EMC2 instance, you need to configure the AWS Account in the Inventory, add a new Transporter then add a new Repository.

Access the Nakivo web console and click on Configuration.

Select Inventory tab, click Add New button then select AWS Account.

Enter a Display name and select AWS account as Type from the drop-down menu. Enter the AWS access Key ID and the Secret access key you got during the user creation (check IAM Console > Users > Security Credentials) then click Add.

The new Inventory is being added to Nakivo.

Once the AWS Inventory has been added, the available Regions are displayed.

To start using Amazon EC2, a virtual server known as an Amazon EC2 instance has to be launched. Select Transporter tab and click Add Transporter button. Select Deploy new transporter (AWS EC2) option.

Enter the Transporter Name and specify the Transporter type. Select the Region on which you want to deploy the transporter and specify the Instance type. Leave Automatically configure VPC for this transporter option enabled and click Deploy to start the deployment.

The new AWS transporter is being added to the system.

The transporter has been added successfully.

Select Repositories tab and click Add Backup Repository button. Select Create new backup repository option.

Specify the Name, the Assigned Transporter and select from the drop down menu Amazon EBS item as Type.

Optionally you can specify a schedule to Detach/Attach the repository.

The new repository is being added.

The repository has been created successfully.

Configure a backup to AWS

Storing your backup copies to a local repository only doesn't protect the data in case of local storage failure. Placing the secondary backup repository in Amazon cloud, you can guarantee a better security for the data integrity. Data are transferred via AES 256 encrypted link and only changed data are transferred to the offsite repository since Nakivo performs forever-incremental backups.

From the Dashboard menu, click Create and select Backup copy job option.

Select the source backup to copy offsite then click Next.

Select the previously configured AWS Backup repository and click Next.

Specify a Schedule and click Next when done.

Give a Job Name and configure the available options. Specify the desired Recovery points retention and click Finish to save the configuration.

To run the job immediately, right click the backup copy job just created and select Run Job.

Click Run to confirm.

The selected VMs are copied to the Amazon EC2 instance.

When the job has completed, you can check result and statistics directly in the Dashboard.

Granular recover from AWS backups

With Nakivo you can recover files, Microsoft Exchange objects, and Microsoft Active Directory objects from compressed and deduplicated AWS EC2 backups without recovering the full AWS EC2 instance first.