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Enterprises like the flexibility and scalability of the AWS cloud because they can quickly deploy 100’s of VMs, multiple databases, kubernetes, and other services in a matter of minutes in order to meet their business requirements. But not all workloads or environments can be deployed in the AWS cloud because of regulations, data governance, and requirements for edge data processing. To address this issue, AWS announced AWS Outposts at re:Invent 2018. AWS Outposts is designed to bring the features of AWS cloud to an on-premises data center.

AWS Outposts provides native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to run in on-prem data centers, co-location spaces, or facilities. AWS Outposts will also provide consistency by allowing enterprises to use the same AWS APIs, tools, and infrastructure across on-prem and AWS cloud. It’s designed for connected environments and can be used to support workloads that need to remain on-prem due to low latency or local data processing needs and will be fully managed, maintained, and supported by AWS.

Figure 1 – AWS Outposts overview

reference: https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/

AWS Outposts will come in two variants:

• VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts – Allows companies to use VMware and VMware APIs that they currently use in their existing environment
• AWS native variant of AWS Outposts – Allows companies to use the same exact APIs and control plane that is used in AWS cloud

Since AWS Outposts will be deployed in on-prem facilities, enterprises need to have a data management solution for their AWS Outposts environments in case they need to recover data corruption, ransomware, end user error as well as power outages and natural disasters.

Figure 2 – Customer responsibilities

reference: www.aws.com

Cohesity’s software provides the following benefits for AWS Outposts:

• Protect Outposts and other on-prem workloads

• Back up EC2 and VMware instances running on Outpost with the ability to archive to cloud on Amazon S3
• Comprehensive backup of AWS Outposts workloads with agent or snapshot based approaches to optimize for app-consistency, speed, and storage footprint
• Back up other workloads outside of Outposts running in AWS cloud to archive to Amazon S3 without the need for additional backup infrastructure

• Same experience over hybrid cloud

• Cohesity provides a single platform and UI to consolidate and manage data over hybrid cloud
• Leveraging the same cloud-native APIs on AWS cloud and AWS Outposts as well as VMware APIs
• Protect on-prem and cloud workloads the same way while enabling hybrid cloud workload mobility

• Reduce backup costs and simplify data management operations

• Cohesity delivers comprehensive protection of hybrid cloud workloads, eliminating costs and complexities of multiple point solutions
• Single UI that provides visibility and enables global management and global search and recovery of data scattered across multiple AWS regions and on-prem on AWS Outposts
• Global deduplication, compression, and direct integration to all Amazon S3 storage classes, including S3 Glacier Deep Archive, further reduces storage and data transfer costs over hybrid cloud

The Cohesity engineering team worked closely with the AWS Outposts team to successfully validate our data management solution with the AWS native variant of AWS Outposts. In our testing, we validated the following:

• Deploy Cohesity cluster in AWS Outposts environment
• Backup and recovery of AWS Outposts EC2 data
• Backup and recovery of AWS RDS instance in AWS cloud
• Backup and recovery of AWS EC2 instance in AWS using Cloud Snapshot Manager

The Cohesity engineering team deployed a 4-node Cohesity cluster to the AWS Outposts infrastructure. Cohesity provides the flexibility of deploying the Cohesity cluster in AWS Outposts or AWS cloud depending on the customer’s requirements. As AWS Outposts and AWS cloud environments grow, enterprises can add additional nodes to the Cohesity cluster to meet their capacity and performance requirements.

Figure 3 – AWS Outposts console with Cohesity cluster running

After deploying Cohesity in AWS Outposts, registered data protection sources of the AWS Outposts and AWS cloud environments.

Figure 4 – Cohesity UI with AWS Outposts, AWS Cloud and server registered sources

After registering the AWS sources, Cohesity engineering team validated backup and recovery of EC2 instances running in AWS Outposts and AWS cloud.

Figure 5 – Successful backup of AWS Outposts EC2 instance data

Figure 6 – Configuration of protection job of AWS EC2 instance

Figure 7 – Recover options of an EC2 instance in the Cohesity UI

Figure 8 – Restore EC2 instance in AWS console

The Cohesity engineering team validated backup and recovery of RDS instances in AWS cloud.

Figure 9 – Protection job for RDS with replication to another AWS region

Figure 10 – Recover RDS to AWS cloud

Figure 11 – Recovered RDS in AWS console

Cohesity’s validated AWS Outposts solution provides enterprises the ability to have a single control plane to manage their data regardless of whether the data resides on AWS Outposts or AWS cloud. Cohesity’s software-defined architecture allows enterprises a modern data management solution for their requirements for today—and any future requirements—without any compromises.

For additional information about Cohesity’s solution with AWS Outposts, please visit our website.

For additional information about AWS Outposts, please visit AWS Outposts.