Snapshooting data recovery

Data recovery is always one of the key fall-back technologies for any business once an IT problem interrupts normal service. Applications can be re-installed, but if data cannot be easily recovered it may be lost forever.  Making this as easy as possible is now the target of IaaS provider, CloudSigma, with the announcement of an enhanced version of its Solid State Drive (SSD) based cloud storage system.

This now comes with a highly-granular snapshot management technology designed to improve data protection and access in the cloud. Because it is a cloud service, customers can now seamlessly and cost-effectively incorporate enterprise storage strategies into their cloud infrastructure while meeting complex compute requirements.

“What’s great about our snapshot technology is that it is completely non-disruptive”

With CloudSigma’s snapshot management capability, customers are able to snapshot live running drives for regular data backup. In addition, they can also clone them to create full drives to run separate VMs from. The new drive can either be at the same site or a second site, assisting with off-site data recovery and eliminating companies’ cloud backup concerns.

Off-site backup is managed from the CloudSigma WebApp, which not only guarantees that IOPS bottlenecks are avoided thanks to its SSD storage, but that data can be recovered on a drive-by-drive basis.

The company claims to be one of the few cloud providers that offers this level of granularity, allowing it to meet custom requirements and complex workloads, ensuring enterprise information is highly-available, regardless of its dataset type.

As well as cloud-based disaster recovery, the snapshot technology can also be applied to other practical use cases. One of the most common is allowing companies to create a fully functional copy of a production environment for testing and development to show what would happen when any changes are put into production.

The new snapshot management technology is fully integrated into CloudSigma’s existing platform. Customers are able to automate their snapshot management processes by creating appropriate management policies. These allow customers to define scheduled snapshots, snapshot retention policies and more. Multiple policies are possible and each policy can be applied to one or more drives.

This approach can eliminate the time and cost needed to manually manage storage in the cloud. Companies can also further save on resources because CloudSigma only charges for the incremental data stored on a per GB basis, with no added premium.

“What’s great about our snapshot technology is that it is completely non-disruptive,” said Robert Jenkins, CEO, CloudSigma. “Once the drive snapshot is created, an exact replica can be generated quickly at any time based on that snapshot. This replica can then be used as a ready-to-go replacement, should a disaster occur. Combining this with our existing private patching capability, companies can also easily pull that clone back into their private compute environment, as if nothing happened. We are truly transforming storage management in the cloud, even for companies with the most complex compute and security needs who can now make our public cloud a key part of their business continuity strategy.”