Instant Restore for OpenStack

In today’s data-driven world, businesses rely heavily on their OpenStack clouds to store and manage critical information. However, with the ever-increasing volume and complexity of data, protecting against data loss and ensuring rapid recovery in the event of a disaster is paramount. This is where Storware’s Instant Restore for OpenStack comes in as a revolutionary solution.

What is Instant Restore?

Instant Restore is a feature introduced in Storware Backup and Recovery version 6.1 that enables instant recovery of OpenStack instances directly from backup storage. This eliminates the need for lengthy restore processes, ensuring business continuity and minimizing downtime.

Key Benefits of Instant Restore

Instant Restore offers a multitude of benefits for OpenStack users, including:

• Rapid Recovery: Recover instances in seconds, not hours or days, significantly reducing downtime and ensuring business continuity.
• Reduced Complexity: Eliminate the need for complex restore procedures, simplifying data recovery operations.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Streamline data protection processes, reducing IT overhead and associated costs.
• Enhanced Disaster Recovery: Strengthen disaster recovery capabilities by enabling rapid restoration of critical workloads.

How Instant Restore Works

Instant restore for OpenStack requires a few configuration steps on the storage side.

• First, you need to expose your synthetic backup destination to your cinder. Every node requires a separate volume type that is defined in the cinder.conf file. This storage class is going to be used during instant restore for newly created volumes (to be replaced by the actual data from backup destination). Note, that your synthetic backup destination may be external to the node – i.e. external DataDomain or simple NFS 4.2 on the remote host, so the idea is just to have contents of the backup destination presented as the volume type in OpenStack and the node.
• Once this part is done and inventory synchronization detects new volume types, you need to map them to each of the nodes that you have. From this moment when you run instant restore the volumes that are created using the empty volumes created using these volume types, will be replaced by the ones kept in the backup destination. From the OpenStack perspective, nothing changes and the instance boots from them without the need to restore data back to the OpenStack environment – the I/O operations transparently are happening in the Storware Backup and Recovery.

• There is also an option to invoke automatic volume migration once this instance is created. This is useful if you want to immediately start using this instance, but you already know that this instance needs to run on your production storage.

Impact on OpenStack Data Protection and Disaster Recovery

Instant Restore is a game-changer for OpenStack data protection and disaster recovery. Its ability to restore instances in seconds significantly enhances business continuity and reduces the impact of data loss or system failures. Moreover, it simplifies disaster recovery procedures, making it easier for organizations to prepare for and respond to unforeseen events.

Conclusion

Instant Restore is a must-have feature for any organization running OpenStack. Its ability to provide rapid recovery, reduce complexity, and enhance disaster recovery capabilities makes it an essential tool for data protection and business continuity.