Cloud Protection Manager Advanced Edition (PV)
N2W Software | 1.5.0pLinux/Unix, Ubuntu 12.04 - 64-bit Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
Done and done, well mostly..
The Cloud Protection Manager product provides an easy to use interface that enables you to backup and restore out of the box.
After spinning up our AWS infrastructure it became quite clear that managing snapshots for multiple volumes with many instances was not going to be something that would happen easily. We started off with some basic scripting to create nightly snaps that were scheduled via cron and another script that would remove the old snaps after X days. The largest issue came when we needed to restore a full instance and all of its respective volumes. In a disaster situation the number of steps needed to manually recover an instance combined with multiple instances immediately had us searching for a solution.
We had the requirement for the solution to be hosted in our infrastructure. We were not interested in leveraging a SaaS provider that had our credentials and remotely accessed the system. We came across CPM and immediately started a trial. Out of the box we were backing up and restoring systems without any issue. We have used the backups several times to help replicate PROD issues by restoring a full instance into a different VPC and Subnet with just a few click of the mouse.
The developers and support have been very responsive to our questions and have offered several suggestion to assist with our deployment. We have now converted to the Advanced edition and are quite happy with the speed at which we were able to get backups up and running with very little effort on our part.
Why not 5 stars? The major issue that we have is relating to the way scripts are handled to deal with databases and setting them into and out of hot backup mode. The functionality is there to do this but in a large enterprise with many DB servers the current solution does not scale well in our opinion. We are working around it with some external automation but we hope that this changes in the future. IN addition the ability to restore across AWS accounts is missing. This is important to us as we have multiple accounts to separate some functions and occasionally need to put a backup of a system in the other account. Currently we have to do this manually, again we hope that this is supported in the future.
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Best Tool To Manage Ad Hoc AWS Instance Backup
Update 2/12/2015
Since the 1.5.0 update to CPM, all of our complaints have been answered, thus updating my review from 4 stars to 5.
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For our clients we find ourselves managing a number of "Ad Hoc" AWS instances, and there aren't a lot of good solutions (or any) to keep track of snapshot backups. Sure we have scripts to do it, but we always find bugs and auditing is an issue and takes time. We've found on many occasions that our script failed to remove some snapshot, only to be found months later and costing us money. The time and headache involved was just not worth it.
By "Ad Hoc" I simply mean not fully automated, a one-off server. If you have a fully automated stack your backup needs are probably much less, but again for us we have many specialized servers and need traditional style backups.
Not finding any solutions, we considered writing our own more robust script/application, but then we found CPM, and I'm very glad we did. It does everything we need and keeps everything nice and neat, and it allows our clients to login and check on backups as well, if they so choose, something we would have never had time to implement in our own system. VSS backups for Windows instances is a nice add-on as well.
This really is the only product out there to manage AWS backups and it will meet your expectations.
There aren't any strong negatives to this product, but it is clearly a version 1.x product. All the key features you need are there, but there are missing "nice to haves" that you may miss. One of these for us is the "managed accounts" feature. These accounts let you give customers or other departments their own account, but right now there is no way to see their backups on your dashboard from an admin account, you must login with the same user/password as "managed account" to see this. Not a showstopper for us.
Finally, the support staff for N2WS has been great. They always respond to support requests very quickly and have helped us through any problems we have encountered with the product. They also have been very helpful letting us know what new features and fixes are in the pipeline.