Fault Tolerance and High Availability in Cloud Volumes Service

NetApp Cloud Volumes Service provides persistent storage to build reliable, fault-tolerant and highly available systems in the cloud. These qualities are designed into Cloud Volumes Service, without any special action to be taken by the customer. By way of example: Amazon EC2 provides infrastructure building blocks that, by themselves, may not be fault-tolerant. By combining with other AWS features and Cloud Volumes Service, the EC2 instances are backed by persistent storage, which is reliable, fault-tolerant and highly available. The cloud volumes are based on the NetApp ONTAP infrastructure and are present in every AZ in the region, eliminating the need to make copies of the data in each AZ, as with other solutions.

High Availability: End-to-End

The NetApp Cloud Volumes Service infrastructure clusters are configured in high-availability (HA) pairs for fault tolerance and non-disruptive operations. If a node fails or if there is a need to bring a node down for routine maintenance, its partner can take over its storage function and continue to serve data from it. The partner then gives back the storage when the node is brought back online.

Cross Regional Availability and Disaster Recovery

NetApp has integrated Cloud Sync into NetApp Cloud Volumes Service. Cloud Sync is designed to address the challenges of synchronizing data to the cloud by providing a fast, secure, and reliable way for organizations to transfer data from any NFSv3 or SMB file shares to another NFSV3 or SMB file share, across regions. Cloud Sync works not only with NetApp cloud storage, but with any NFSv3/SMB share. Having your data continuously in two (or more) places gives opens the doors for disaster recovery and development. You can use the target as a backup, as a disaster recovery location, as a clone of the dataset, or as the source for a swarm of clones and copies for use cases like analytics and new application development.

Cloud Backup Service: Integration with Cloud Volumes Service

The NetApp Cloud Volumes Service infrastructure has an integrated Cloud Backup Service feature. Cloud Backup Service offers add-on backup capabilities to protect your cloud volumes using hyperscaler object storage. Cloud Backup Service is fully managed by NetApp, with features like:

• Scheduled and manual backup of a volume and volume restore
• Backup data stored in object storage form in hyperscaler object service
• Integrated UI, with the look and feel with Cloud Volumes to perform self-service operations
• Billed on a metered basis, integrated with hyperscaler billing
• Full API support
• End-to-end security and no public access
• Data secured at rest with AES-256bit encryption
• Data secured in flight in object storage using TLS/HTTPS
• NetApp controlled cloud access (encryption key, cloud credentials, cloud management access)
  • Multiple layers of encryption for tenant security and separation
  • No single global encryption key
• Private network connections to Cloud Volumes Service and object storage for operations

Pulling It All Together: a Trio of Protective Features

Through a combination of cloud synchronization, cloud backup, and high-availability pairs, NetApp Cloud Volumes Service is able to offer fault tolerant, persistent storage in the cloud. In the event of disaster, your data is always protected by this trifecta of features—so you can focus on your job, without worrying about the availability, security, and recoverability of your cloud data and applications.

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