Volume 15, Issue IIIHello and welcome to this March 2015 Server and StorageIO update newsletter. Here in the northern hemisphere at least by the calendar spring is here, weather wise winter continues to linger in some areas. March also means in the US college university sports tournaments with many focused on their NCAA men’s basketball championship brackets. Besides various college championships, March also has a connection to back up and data protection. Thus this months newsletter has a focus on data protection, after all March 31 is World Backup Day which means it should also be World Restore test day! Focus on Data ProtectionData protection including backup/restore, business continuance (BC), disaster recovery (DR), business resiliency (BR) and archiving across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Data Protection FundamentalsA reminder on the importance of data protection including backup, BC, DR and related technologies is to make sure they are occuring as planned. Also test your copies and remember the 4 3 2 1 rule or guide. 4 – Versions (different time intervals)
3 – Copies of critical data (including versions)
2 – Different media, devices or systems
1 – Off-site (cloud or elsewhere) The above means having at least four (4) different versions from various points in time of your data. Having three (3) copies including various versions protects against one or more copies being corrupt or damaged. Placing those versions and copies on at least two (2) different storage systems, devices or media if something happens. While it might be common sense, a bad April Fools recovery joke would be finding out all of your copies were on the same device which is damaged. That might seem obvious however sometimes the obvious needs to be stated. Also make sure that at least one (1) of your copies is off-site either on off-line media (tape, disk, ssd, optical) or cloud. Take a few moments and to verify that your data protection strategy is being implemented and practiced as intended. Also test what is being copied including not only restore the data from cloud, disk, ssd or tape, also make sure you can actually read or use the data being protected. This means make sure that your security credentials including access certificates and decryption occur as expected. Watch for more news, updates industry trends perspectives commentary, tips, articles and other information at Storageio.com, StorageIOblog.com, various partner venues as well as in future newsletters. Data Protection Diaries
Are restores ready for World Backup Day?
In case you forgot or did not know, World Backup Day is March 31 2015 (@worldbackupday) so now is a good time to be ready. The only challenge that I have with the World Backup Day (view their site here) that has gone on for a few years know is that it is a good way to call out the importance of backing up or protecting data.
 However it’s also time to put more emphasis and focus on being able to make sure those backups or protection copies actually work. By this I mean doing more than making sure that your data can be read from tape, disk, SSD or cloud service actually going a step further and verifying that restored data can actually be used (read, written, etc). The problem, issue and challenges are simple, are your applications, systems and data protected as well as can you use those protection copies (e.g. backups, snapshots, replicas or archives) when as well as were needed? Read more here about World Backup Day and what I’m doing as well as various tips to be ready for successful recovery and avoid being an April 1st fool ;). Cloud Conversations
AWS S3 Cross Region Replication
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced several enhancements including a new Simple Storage Service (S3) cross-region replication of objects from a bucket (e.g. container) in one region to a bucket in another region. AWS also recently enhanced Elastic Block Storage (EBS) increasing maximum performance and size of Provisioned IOPS (SSD) and General Purpose (SSD) volumes. EBS enhancements included ability to store up to 16 TBytes of data in a single volume and do 20,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). Read more about EBS and other AWS server, storage I/O enhancements here.
Example of some AWS Regions and AZs AWS S3 buckets and objects are stored in a specific region designated by the customer or user (AWS S3, EBS, EC2, Glacier, Regions and Availability Zone primer can be found here). The challenge being addressed by AWS with S3 replication is being able to move data (e.g. objects) stored in AWS buckets in one region to another in a safe, secure, timely, automated, cost-effective way. Continue reading more here about AWS S3 bucket and object replication feature along with related material. Additional March StorageIOblog posts include: 
View other recent as well as past blog posts here | 
