AWS Case Study: Vembu

Vembu Pro is hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure and provides a business-focused online backup service leveraging the highly scalable and redundant AWS cloud infrastructure. Under the hood of Vembu Pro is Vembu’s StoreGrid online backup software which can be hosted on the Service Provider’s own data centers and can be offered as a fully managed online backup service to business customers.

Vembu Pro online backup service is deployed and delivered as a service through the following AWS components:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) hosts the Vembu backup Server Clusters and MySQL database servers in Amazon’s US East Coast and Europe Datacenters. Vembu also uses Amazon EC2 for internal testing infrastructure to test StoreGrid software on scalable loads.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) serves as the primary storage back-end for customers’ backup data uploaded to Vembu backup server clusters.
• Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) temporarily caches uploaded backup data to the Vembu backup server clusters and maintains persistent storage of the MySQL databases storing customers’ account details, backup metadata, reporting data, etc.

Vembu chose AWS primarily for the infinite on-demand scalability potential of both the computing (through Amazon EC2) and storage (through Amazon S3) infrastructures. The following diagram illustrates how AWS is incorporated into the Vembu Pro architecture:

Prior to moving to the cloud, Vembu focused solely on licensing the StoreGrid software to service providers who hosted it themselves in their data centers and offered their own online backup service to clients.

However, Amazon’s ‘pay-as-you-go’ utility pricing based on resources consumed helped make AWS a compelling choice, as it eliminates the capital spending associated with building an infrastructure. “Vembu Pro Online Backup Services would not have been possible without the AWS ‘pay-as-you-go’ pricing model,” says Sekar Vembu, CEO of Vembu Technologies.

Currently, Vembu has around 30 instances running on Amazon EC2 for various purposes such as Quality Assurance, Load Simulation, Functionality Testing and the, Staging and Production Environment for the Vembu Pro Online Backup Service.

Using the AWS cloud to host Vembu Pro online backup services reduces the man-power required for maintaining servers with storage infrastructure. ”Amazon’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) and datacenter security provide us with enough clout to compete with the best in business without a similar upfront cost,” says Sekar Vembu.

AWS has also decreased the time required to host Vembu’s complex solution across two continents (North America and Europe) and offers them the opportunity to add two more continents (Asia and Australia) on just a day’s notice.

In the future, Vembu plans to use the following additional AWS features:

• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), for the centralized scalable database infrastructure.
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), for queuing backup metadata storage processes.
• Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), to balance loads generated on web service requests served by the Vembu Pro websites and Server Web Portal.
• Auto Scaling, to introduce cloud scaling for Vembu Pro’s individual backup server nodes, automatically scaling based on the input load of agent clients uploading backup data from client sites to backup servers.
• AWS Import/Export, so customers with huge backup data can seed initial full backup data and perform subsequent incremental backups over the Internet.
• Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), as a payment gateway to process online payments from customers and partners.

Vembu highly recommends Amazon’s forums and support resources, where discussions are constant and active. Vembu found the Amazon team and the abundant AWS developer community very helpful in finding the right resolutions for specific issues.

“We admire the way AWS is evolving,” says Sekar Vembu. “At Vembu, we are truly impressed with Amazon’s industry-leading continuous innovation around cloud computing infrastructure. Hosting Vembu Pro Online Backup Service in the AWS Cloud has tremendously increased the breadth of the market that we are addressing. It is not just the technology; we have been amazed by the responsiveness and the thoroughness of the people we have interacted with in the AWS team – from the AWS evangelist to the business development team. It’s been a pleasure working with them.”

To learn more, visit http://www.vembu.com/ .