Backups and Retention with Zerto 8.5 and AWS S3 - Zerto
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Achieve Cost-effective Backups and Long-term Retention with Zerto 8.5 and AWS S3

January 4, 2021
Continuous Data Protection
Est. Reading Time: 3 minutes

With the AWS re:Invent virtual event rounding off 2020 and focused on helping customers innovate, I thought it would be timely to talk about how Zerto and AWS together deliver cutting-edge capabilities for backup and long-term retention (LTR). When Zerto 7.0 was released with long-term retention, it was only the beginning of the journey to provide what feels like traditional data protection to meet compliance and regulation requirements for data retention (in addition to the 30-day short-term journal that Zerto uses for blazing fast recovery).

A few versions later with the October release of Zerto 8.5, we’ve expanded that “local repository” to include “remote repositories” in the public cloud. Today, it’s Azure blob (hot/cold), and AWS S3 (with support for Standard S3, Standard S3-IA, or Standard One Zone-IA). Utilizing native cloud object storage for LTR offers both cost and recovery speed benefits. Zerto 8.5’s native long-term retention to public cloud AWS storage, along with built-in data reduction and compression, enables AWS storage as a scalable, cost-effective LTR target.

And to demonstrate how to do it, I’ve created some content, which includes video and a white paper that walks you through the process. In the video, I even go as far as running a retention job (backup) to AWS S3, and restoring data from S3 to test the recovery experience.

If you have a requirement to encrypt your backup data, S3 Bucket Encryption using Amazon S3 key (SSE-E3) can be leveraged, and the solution works without any changes to the IAM policy. There are two methods to encrypt the S3 bucket, with Amazon S3 key as the first and recommended option. The second option is the AWS Key Management Service key (SSE-KMS). I suggest taking a look at the pricing and comparison that provides examples for both methods. According to what I’ve found, you can cut costs by up to 99% by using the Amazon S3 key. So, go ahead, give it a read!

Now for the fun stuff…

First up, you can watch the YouTube video below (or you can watch it on my YouTube channel) .

I’ve also started branching out to live streaming some of the work I’m doing on my Twitch channel.

If you find the information useful, I’d really appreciate if you’d follow my posts on both platforms, and hey, enable the notifications so when I post new content or go live, you can get notified and participate. Your feedback is definitely welcome and helpful to make sure I’m doing something that is beneficial for the community. So please post your comments.

Give the white paper read to see exactly how Zerto on AWS enables scalable, cost-effective LTR. Please feel free to share this blog and the resources contained here, because information’s only useful if those who are looking for it are made aware.

Cheers!

 

 

Chris Rogers

Chris Rogers is a Technology Evangelist at Zerto with 11 years of experience as an IT Professional focusing on data center virtualization and Data Protection. In his previous role, Chris was a Cloud Architect within the MSP Team. He lives in the UK with his wife, Lou, and 2 cats. He has his own technology-focused blog and enjoys most sports, and loves his cars.