Cutting-edge disaster recovery for critical enterprise applications

Enterprise data backup and recovery has always been one of the most compelling and widely adopted public cloud use cases. That’s still true today, as businesses leverage the cloud to protect increasingly critical applications with stricter RTO/RPO requirements.Veeam and Google Cloud have long been leaders at providing reliable, verifiable, cloud-based recovery solutions across any environment or application. And now, we’re taking another step in that direction with the introduction of Continuous Data Protection (CDP) disaster recovery for business-critical Tier One applications. Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) and Veeam Backup for Google Cloud (VBG), available on Google Cloud Marketplace, offer enterprises a faster, simpler, and more cost-effective way to level up your company’s backup and recovery capabilities. Enterprise customers can take control and craft a backup and storage strategy based on their SLA requirements and RTO/RPO goals, rather than cost, capacity, or scalability constraints. And with Google Cloud, enterprises get the secure, global cloud infrastructure and applications they need to achieve value with digital transformation.3 ways Veeam and Google Cloud elevate your company’s backup and recovery gameMore than ever, businesses are adopting cloud migration and modernization strategies to cut costs, simplify and streamline IT overhead, and enable innovation. And with four out of five organizations planning to use either cloud storage or a managed backup service within the next two years¹, many will be looking to understand just how and why the cloud can help them protect their businesses and serve their big-picture cloud objectives.There are a lot of different ways to tackle these questions when it comes to leveraging VBR and VBG on Google Cloud infrastructure. We’ll focus here on a few that appear to be top of mind with many of our customers.Cloud-based CDP for business-critical applications. Disaster recovery (DR) for critical Tier One applications doesn’t leave much room for error: Many of these applications will measure RTOs and RPOs in minutes or even seconds to avoid a major business disruption.In some cases, these applications use dedicated, high-availability infrastructure to maintain independent disaster recovery capabilities. In many others, however, it falls upon IT to maintain an on-prem CDR solution, running on dedicated DR infrastructure, to ensure near real-time RTOs/RPOs for enterprise Tier One applications.VBR on Google Cloud gives these enterprises a complete and fully managed CDR solution delivering RPOs measured in seconds. And by running VBR on Google Cloud’s highly secure, global cloud infrastructure, even the most advanced enterprise IT organizations can deploy a DR environment that will match or exceed their on-prem capabilities — with none of the CapEx, overhead costs, or management headaches.Right-sizing your enterprise backup strategy. Of course, many enterprise applications don’t require this level of protection, especially in terms of RPOs. In many cases, snapshot-based replication, typically with 6-12-hour RPOs, is enough for a business to recover less critical systems without suffering a major business setback.Veeam customers get the flexibility they need to choose the right type of protection for their applications and business data. They can easily store both VM replicas and an unlimited number of Veeam backups in Google Cloud, and restore from either source. Google’s Archive tier of object storage gives VBG customers one of the industry’s most cost-effective long-term storage solutions—while still achieving relatively fast RTOs.Running Veeam on Google Cloud also solves the scalability challenges that so many enterprises face when they manage on-prem systems. With Veeam and Google Cloud, an organization’s DR and backup capabilities will always align seamlessly with business needs.For example, resizing a Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) cluster or spinning up additional clusters is something that can happen on the fly to accommodate restores and migrations. There’s no need to worry about overprovisioning and, with Veeam’s Universal Licensing, no additional licenses are required to migrate to the cloud. Customers can make DR and backup decisions based entirely on risk and business considerations, rather than on budget constraints or arbitrary resource limitations.Getting out of the data center game. Finally, running VBR on Google Cloud can be a major step towards retiring costly, resource-intensive, on-prem IT assets. Most enterprises today are moving aggressively to retire data centers and migrate applications to the public cloud; virtually all of them are now managing hybrid cloud environments that make it easier to move workloads between on-prem and public cloud infrastructure.By leveraging the cloud as a DR target, Veeam on Google Cloud reduces some of the costs and IT resources associated with maintaining on-prem data centers, servers, storage, and network infrastructure. Setting the stage for digital transformationDisaster recovery has always been a frustrating initiative for enterprise IT. It’s a demanding, expensive, resource-intensive task, yet it’s also one where dropping the ball can be a catastrophic mistake. We can’t take DR — or backup and recovery in general — off an IT organization’s list of priorities. But Veeam and Google Cloud can make it much simpler, easier, and less expensive for our customers to maintain world-class backup and recovery capabilities while putting themselves in a great position to achieve their broader digital transformation goals.Google Cloud Marketplace makes procurement easier, too: Buying VBR and VBG on Google Cloud Marketplace helps fast-track corporate technology purchases by allowing you to purchase from an approved vendor, Google. All Marketplace purchases are included in your single Google Cloud bill, while drawing down any monthly spend commitment you may already have with Google Cloud. To learn more about how Veeam and Google Cloud work together to help you keep your critical applications protected, visit veeam.com/google-cloud-backup.Related ArticleCIS hardening support in Container-Optimized OS from GoogleOur latest Container-Optimized OS release supports CIS benchmark compliance and can provide continuous CIS scanning capabilities.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

Introducing the latest Slurm on Google Cloud scripts

Google Cloud is a great home for your high performance computing (HPC) workloads. As with all things Google Cloud, we work hard to make complex tasks seem easy. For HPC, a big part of user friendliness is support for popular tools such as schedulers.If you run high performance computing (HPC) workloads, you’re likely familiar with the Slurm workload manager. Today, with SchedMD, we’re announcing the newest set of features for Slurm running on Google Cloud, including one-click hybrid configuration, Google Cloud Storage data migration support, real-time configuration updates, Bulk API support, improved error handling, and more. You can find these new features today in the Slurm on Google Cloud GitHub repository and on the Google Cloud Marketplace.Slurm is one of the leading open-source HPC workload managers used in TOP 500 supercomputers around the world. Over the past five years, we’ve worked with SchedMD, the company behind Slurm, to release ever-improving versions of Slurm on Google Cloud. Here’s more information about our newest features:Turnkey hybrid configurationYou can now use a simple hybrid Slurm configuration setup script for enabling Google Cloud partitions in an existing Slurm controller, allowing Slurm users to connect an on-premise cluster to Google Cloud quickly and easily.Google Cloud Storage data migration supportSlurm now has a workflow script that supports Google Cloud Storage, allowing users to define data movement actions to and from storage buckets as part of their job. Note that Slurm can handle jobs with input and output data pointing to different Google Cloud Storage locations.Real-time Configuration UpdatesSlurm now supports post-deployment reconfiguration of partitions, with responsive actions taken as needed, allowing users to make changes to their HPC environment on-the-fly.Bulk API supportBuilding on the Bulk API integration completed in the Slurm scripts released last year, the newest scripts now support Bulk API’s Regional Endpoint calls, Spot VMs, and more.Clearer error handlingThis latest version of Slurm on Google Cloud will indicate the specific place (e.g. job node, node info, filtered log file, etc.) where an API error has occurred, and expose any underlying Google API errors directly to users. The scripts also add an “installing” animation and guidance on how to check for errors during the installation process if it takes a longer time than expected.Billing tracking in BigQuery and StackdriverYou can now access usage data in BigQuery, which you can merge with Google Cloud billing data to compute the costs of individual jobs, and track and display custom metrics for Stackdriver jobs.Adherence to Terraform and Image Creation best practicesThe Slurm image creation process has now been converted to a Packer-based solution. The necessary scripts are incorporated into an image and then parameters are provided via metadata to define the Ansible configuration, all of which follows Terraform and Image Creation best practices. All new Terraform resources now use Cloud Foundation Toolkit modules where available, and you can use bootstrap scripts to configure and deploy Terraform modules.Authentication ConfigurationYou can now enable or disable oslogin and install LDAP libraries (e.g. OSLogin, LDAP, Disabled, etc) across your Slurm cluster. Note that the admin must manually configure non-oslogin auth across the cluster.Support for Instance TemplatesFollowing on the Instance Template support launched in last year’s Slurm on Google Cloud version, you can now use additional Instance Template features launched in the intervening year (e.g. hyperthreading, Spot VM).Enhanced customization of partitionsThe latest version of Slurm on Google Cloud adds multiple ways to customize your deployed partitions including: Injection of custom prolog and epilog scripts, pre-partition startup scripts, and the ability to configure more Slurm capabilities on compute nodes.Getting startedThe Slurm experts at SchedMD built this new release. You can download this release in SchedMD’s GitHub repository. For more information, check out the included README. If you need help getting started with Slurm check out the quick start guide, and for help with the Slurm features for Google Cloud check out the Slurm Auto-Scaling Cluster codelab and the Deploying a Slurm cluster on Google Compute Engine and Installing apps in a Slurm cluster on Compute Engine solution guides. If you have further questions, you can post on the Slurm on Google Cloud Google discussion group, or contact SchedMD directly.Related ArticleIntroducing the latest Slurm on GCP scriptsThe latest version of Slurm for Google Cloud includes support for Terraform, the HPC VM Image, placement policies, Bulk API and instance …Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform