Forum Discussion

samshaw's avatar
samshaw
Level 3
7 years ago

CloudPoint Questions

Hello there, How are you ? We are a new customer evaluating Cloud Point since our workloads are 100% AWS based. Can you please provide information on the following : 1) Is CloudPoint in freemium mo...
  • suchintya's avatar
    suchintya
    7 years ago

    Hi there,

    Thanks for asking these questions. Here are the answers:

    1) CloudPoint has following offerings:

    • Free: this is the free version you can use for 10FETB of data protection with VOX community support. There is no limit to the number of days of use.
    • Express: this has the same features as "Free" above but you get Veritas support and can purchase as much capacity as you want. You can also meter your usage by number of VM protected
    • Enterprise: this has more features than "Express", such as agentless snapshots, individual file restore and also comes with Veritas support.

    Irrespective of which tier you use, you will have the same deployment experience. We hope its easy to deploy and welcome any feedback from your experience.

    2) 2.0 GA is mid-January

    3) Thanks for the feedback. I will update this answer with a detailed permission policy in a couple of days.

    4) With 2.0, we are adding more applications: SQL Server 2016, RDS, Aurora. We will continue to build this lineup further. All agents are automatically upgraded. You can also choose to deploy our agentless protection mechanism.

    5) Thanks for the feedback. We are designing this feature and you should see this in a future release.

    6) We are also building a tag based protection so that policies can be dynamically protected as new instances are launched. This feature will be available early next year.

    7) It's also part of a future release. We are working in partnership with NetApp to build this integration.

    8) CloudPoint integrates with native snapshot technology. We anticipate that any performance impact comes from the underlying platform in how many requests can be made in an hour. I am curious to see if you are hitting any performance issues. We can use any such input you can provide us to improve our product to best meet your requirements.

    Yes, you can delete a snapshot in between and still get full recovery. When you delete any snapshot, AWS merges the data with the next immediate snapshot so that the chain is never broken.

    9) When you take a snapshot of the host, AWS creates an AMI. This AMI contains all the snapshot of disks underlying that EC2 instance in one group and guarantees that all disk snapshots have the exact same timestamp.

    If you snapshot the disks independently, there's no guarantee that all the disks snapshot have the same timestamp. So now during restore, you will need to individually attach all disks to the host to fully recreate the original state of the instance. This can be avoided if you create a full host/ instance snapshot.

    10) AWS doesn't guarantee a "quiesced" snapshot so you risk losing any data in the buffer. But you can do this using CloudPoint. Using the enterprise tier product, you can recognize the application inside the host, and CloudPoint will guarantee an app consistent snapshot by quiescing the application state before the snapshot and releasing the application after.

    11) Not entirely of what the workflow is. Could you please elaborate?

    12) When an EC2 instance is displayed in the CloudPoint console, we use the "name" tag as shown the EC2 console. Since the instance is new there's no "name" provided for the new instance. If you update the "name" tag in the EC2 console, we will update our UI to reflect that change. Does that help?

suchintya's avatar
suchintya
Level 3
7 years ago

Hi there,

Thanks for asking these questions. Here are the answers:

1) CloudPoint has following offerings:

  • Free: this is the free version you can use for 10FETB of data protection with VOX community support. There is no limit to the number of days of use.
  • Express: this has the same features as "Free" above but you get Veritas support and can purchase as much capacity as you want. You can also meter your usage by number of VM protected
  • Enterprise: this has more features than "Express", such as agentless snapshots, individual file restore and also comes with Veritas support.

Irrespective of which tier you use, you will have the same deployment experience. We hope its easy to deploy and welcome any feedback from your experience.

2) 2.0 GA is mid-January

3) Thanks for the feedback. I will update this answer with a detailed permission policy in a couple of days.

4) With 2.0, we are adding more applications: SQL Server 2016, RDS, Aurora. We will continue to build this lineup further. All agents are automatically upgraded. You can also choose to deploy our agentless protection mechanism.

5) Thanks for the feedback. We are designing this feature and you should see this in a future release.

6) We are also building a tag based protection so that policies can be dynamically protected as new instances are launched. This feature will be available early next year.

7) It's also part of a future release. We are working in partnership with NetApp to build this integration.

8) CloudPoint integrates with native snapshot technology. We anticipate that any performance impact comes from the underlying platform in how many requests can be made in an hour. I am curious to see if you are hitting any performance issues. We can use any such input you can provide us to improve our product to best meet your requirements.

Yes, you can delete a snapshot in between and still get full recovery. When you delete any snapshot, AWS merges the data with the next immediate snapshot so that the chain is never broken.

9) When you take a snapshot of the host, AWS creates an AMI. This AMI contains all the snapshot of disks underlying that EC2 instance in one group and guarantees that all disk snapshots have the exact same timestamp.

If you snapshot the disks independently, there's no guarantee that all the disks snapshot have the same timestamp. So now during restore, you will need to individually attach all disks to the host to fully recreate the original state of the instance. This can be avoided if you create a full host/ instance snapshot.

10) AWS doesn't guarantee a "quiesced" snapshot so you risk losing any data in the buffer. But you can do this using CloudPoint. Using the enterprise tier product, you can recognize the application inside the host, and CloudPoint will guarantee an app consistent snapshot by quiescing the application state before the snapshot and releasing the application after.

11) Not entirely of what the workflow is. Could you please elaborate?

12) When an EC2 instance is displayed in the CloudPoint console, we use the "name" tag as shown the EC2 console. Since the instance is new there's no "name" provided for the new instance. If you update the "name" tag in the EC2 console, we will update our UI to reflect that change. Does that help?

  • AlexMatts's avatar
    AlexMatts
    Level 6
    7 years ago

    Hello –

    Thank you, suchintya, for the comprehensive responses to the questions posed by samshaw – this is appreciated. I was especially pleased to see the feature noted by samshaw is already scheduled to be included in a future release; user experience is meaningful, at Veritas.

    samshaw, can you provide Sunchintya additional details on the workflow referenced so he may provide a fuller answer? This would be incredibly helpful.

    Thank you both, for your effort and time.

    Kindly – Alexandra Matthiesen, VOX Community Manager

     

  • mehrdad64's avatar
    mehrdad64
    Level 3
    4 years ago

    hi , thanks for the info . i have a couple of question about  CP too.

    i would be grateful if you could help me with them.

    how CP FE TB licensing works , what will happen if my data grows beyond licenced capacity does CP stops working or it will give me a grace period to buy more Capacity?