As telecommunications companies accelerate their efforts to deploy next gen 5G and RAN networks, they face new challenges ensuring cyber-resiliency for the comprehensive solution stack. Their infrastructure stack usually involves physical, cloud, virtual and container workloads. Efficient protection of these varied workloads with disparate backup and recovery requirements can be complex and challenging.
Let us look at VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform (TCP) which provides centralized management and control of virtual infrastructures to streamline the deployment of network services. It comprises of multiple tiers - the physical, platform, resource orchestration, cloud automation, operations, and solutions tiers. This platform was designed for rapid onboarding and deployment of VNF (virtual network function) and cloud-native network functions (CNF) in different virtual infrastructure managers such as VMware vCenter Server, vCloud Director, Kubernetes, and public cloud Kubernetes clusters. As illustrated in Figure 1, NetBackup can protect the critical assets in each layer of this stack.
So, what kind of data in VMware Telco Cloud Platform is important to protect? Examples include:
- Log files generated by VNFs, CNFs, and at the orchestration and platform layers to keep track of events occurring in the system may need to be protected for regulatory and compliance purposes.
- VNF databases that store the state of modem resources, connection, and registration.
- Certificates, configuration files, and inventory data of the management and orchestration services that includes the Telco Cloud Automation (TCA) Manager and control planes, and vRealize suite which are part of the management and orchestration tiers.
- Configuration, resource settings and cluster information of vCenter, vCloud Director, and NSX manager at the platform tiers.
NetBackup manages the data protection process for this stack simply as files on local or network-attached storage, virtual machines (VM), and Kubernetes workloads as shown in Figure 2. Policies to protect this stack are defined and managed using a single web-based user interface. Containers within a Kubernetes cluster and VMs within a vCenter are automatically discovered once the credentials of these virtual infrastructure managers are specified. Protecting the TCA, vCenter and NSX Manager requires sending the inventory, certificates, and configuration files to an FTP server. These files are protected by NetBackup. As for VMs and the vRealize Suite, NetBackup offers multiple features such as agentless backups, use of VMware change block tracking for faster backups, intelligent policies to automate the protection of VMs based on certain criteria, granular recovery, instant access, application or crash consistent snapshots. For containers deployed on TKG, NetBackup can include or exclude container resources, provides recovery to same, different Kubernetes cluster or cluster in cloud, automated backup with intelligent polices, throttling settings, and allows for pre-and post-scripts for application-consistent snapshots.
With ransomware and cyber-attacks becoming more common, security is a top priority for telecommunication companies. NetBackup security features include encryption for data in flight and at rest, role-based access control for administration, turning off unused ports, anomaly detection, and other measures to protect data at the enterprise and data center level. NetBackup Appliances improves on this with immutable storage, hardened operating systems and air gapping. For regulatory compliance, auditing and alerting are available to quickly identify unexpected changes and issues encountered in the NetBackup environment.
When it comes to the data protection of VMware or other open-source Telco Cloud platforms NetBackup delivers! To learn more about how NetBackup simplifies the protection of VMware Telco Cloud Platform visit: https://www.veritas.com/content/dam/www/en_us/documents/white-papers/WP_netbackup_protection_of_telc...
Also for more information on Veritas Enterprise Storage and Data Protection for Containers check out this link: https://www.veritas.com/content/dam/www/en_us/documents/solution-overview/SO_data_protection_foundat...
