Simplified protection for all your important files from AWS Cloud using Backup Exec 21.1

[Vivek_M]

Organizations of all sizes are moving their Windows workloads to Amazon Web Services. Many of these workloads—business applications, home directories, web serving environments, and software build setups—depend on shared file storage.

Today, customers must do the time-consuming and costly work of managing Windows file storage on their own. And this is where Amazon FSx for Windows File Server comes into play.

So what is Amazon FSx?

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides a fully managed, high performance, robust & highly scalable File storage that is accessible over the industry-standard Service Message Block (SMB) protocol.

It is built on the Windows Server platform and has native support for Windows file system features and SMB protocol to access storage from the on-premises network.

Why switch from on-premises?

The primary concern of fileservers hosted on-premises is the cost of maintenance. For example, time spent updating the file server's operating system patches, adding security updates, anticipating future data growth, and the direct cost of provisioning storage so the server never reaches capacity.

Additionally, if your current systems are aging and need a refresh, it can be a heavy upfront cost to replace an entire file server.

Amazon FSx greatly reduces the overhead time and cost for operating a fileserver. Here is a customer testimony.

How does Backup Exec fit into the picture?

Backup Exec has a rich history with Amazon Web Storage's Storage services.

Further expanding on that partnership to fulfill our customers' requests, we are adding support for Amazon FSx for Windows File Server with Backup Exec 21.1.

Backup Exec fully supports Amazon FSx based Windows file-shares to achieve the data protection capabilities customers expect for on-premises file systems such as automatic scheduling of backups and granular recovery.

So what does it cost?

Adding support for Amazon FSx does not require any additional licensing.

Yup. Backup Exec customers with existing licensing can protect Amazon Web Services FSx shares hosted in Amazon Web Services Cloud infrastructure at no additional charge. Just configure Amazon Web Services FSx shares for your users, and Backup Exec will protect them like any other workload. For us, it will be just like backing up user shares hosted on heterogeneous systems.

How about the backup performance?

Amazon Web Services FSx shares are highly scaled & throughput-based, high performance-based file systems, and Backup Exec is right there to protect all those file storage shares, no matter how big they are in size.

As far as performance goes, it depends upon how you placed your configuration. For example, if backups from Amazon Web Service FSx shares will reside on a Cloud Storage device (AWS S3 buckets as storage target), it will be very fast. On the other hand, if backups have to reside over Storage devices located on-premise, backup speed will depend on the network speeds and the file system's size.

As long as there is a network connection, Backup Exec will protect these file-shares seamlessly no matter where you deploy Backup exec, on-premises, or Amazon Web Services.  

How do Amazon FSx and Backup Exec handle security/ACL?

Both Amazon FSx and Backup Exec encrypt data in transit and at rest.

Data sent from Amazon FSx to other devices is encrypted by Amazon, while Backup Exec encrypts data using 128-bit, 256-bit encryption & Salt-based encryption when it backs up the data and stores it.  

As far as Access Control is concerned, Standard Windows access control lists (ACLs) are used for fine-grained file- and folder-level access control. Amazon FSx file systems automatically verify users' credentials accessing file system data to enforce these Windows ACLs, and the same applies to Backup Exec.

In summary, if you are thinking of getting rid of managing on-premises Windows File servers OR looking forward to replacing age-old, on-premises file servers with high-performance Amazon Web Services FSx for Windows file servers, trust Backup Exec to achieve all of your data-protection objectives flawlessly.

Amazon FSx FAQ

Creating Amazon Web Services FSx File system

Backup Exec on AWS