In my last blog post, I took a look at using your Cohesity cluster to host file shares, which are called Views in Cohesity. I finished with the point that these file shares might hold valuable data and need to be protected against data loss. Your other data is protected by copying from its location to your Cohesity cluster, but a failure that affects Views on a Cohesity cluster is likely also to affect the data protection copies on that cluster. The good news is that we already know how to protect against a Cohesity cluster failure, and therefore need only apply these same protections to Views. We can archive to the public cloud, replicate to another on-premises Cohesity cluster, and replicate to a Cohesity cluster in the public cloud. The Protection Policy for your View should include archiving or replication to ensure data protection against data loss if your Cohesity Cluster is destroyed. Bear in mind that a Cluster outage is likely to result from a human error or some significant disruption such as a data center flood or fire.
Disclosure: This post is part of my work with Cohesity.
Archive to the Public Cloud
One of the options in a Protection Policy is to place archives in public cloud storage. Public cloud is inherently an off-site location, so this satisfies a standard data protection requirement. I showed how to use AWS Glacier for daily archives is this video last year. In that video, I also covered using S3 as a tier of storage to help handle data protection growth of your on-premises Cohesity cluster.
Replicate to On-premises Cohesity
If you have another Cohesity cluster, then you can always include a replication component in your Protection Policy. In this video, I showed how simple it is to pair two clusters together and replicate protection between them. If you use a lot of Views, you may choose to build a dedicated Cohesity cluster purely for your file shares. Then use your data protection Cohesity cluster in the same data center as a replication destination. A Cohesity cluster in another data center would be another excellent destination for replication in your Protection Policy.
Replicate to the Public Cloud
One exciting capability is to run a Cohesity cluster on a Public cloud provider, and us that cluster for replication. In the Build Day Live event with Cohesity, Michael Letschin demonstrated replicating View to a cloud cluster and then restoring a copy of the View on the Cloud Cluster. Replication to a Public Cloud Cohesity cluster delivers off-site data protection for your Views.
Consider Availability too
In some ways, data protection is a background task, and we are not concerned about transient connectivity outages. These outages might occur because you update a cluster, each node must restart during the upgrade; however, the cluster as a whole remains available. If the cluster is hosting Views, there may be a momentary interruption to service for each connected client. The symptom would be a single file access that is delayed possibly only while DNS refreshes. If the client handles file servers with multiple IP addresses, then there will be no outage. I mention this because we are comfortable patching and updating backup appliances during the working day but may be more reluctant to update our file servers. When a Cohesity cluster hosts file shares, it is now a file server.
© 2019, Alastair. All rights reserved.
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