By December 2024, servers previously supported through EZ-Backup will be transitioned to a new platform that adheres to the industry’s current best practices.
This article applies to: EZ-Backup
In 2023, Server Backup—a new backup service supported by Cohesity—began supporting several of the university servers that had relied on a similar service known as EZ-Backup, part of the IBM Spectrum Project environment. The transition to a new vendor was driven by the changing landscape for backup services across the industry as well as reduced economies of scale that rendered continuation of EZ-Backup unviable.
In collaboration with early adopters across Cornell, a team of engineers in the CIT Cloud and Infrastructure Services group successfully resolved technical issues with the vendor revealed in the pilot project.
The remaining servers will be modernized and shifted to Server Backup between March 2024 and November 2024.
Sooner is better; ensure adequate time for the CIT engineers to work with you on the intricacies associated with your data and your backup use cases by starting the process now.
To begin planning your server migration and getting your organization set up in Cohesity’s Server Backup environment, complete this TeamDynamix (TDX) form.
The TDX form will expedite the onboarding process and lay the foundation for your migration plan.
Before the spring semester ends, the Storage, Backup, and Servers team will contact groups that have not yet responded.
For additional details, see the Cohesity page in our Team Dynamix Knowledge Base.
Aligned with industry standards for today’s backup services, Server and Device Backup uses two rate calculations:
Payment of the monthly bill is coded to integrate with each customer’s designated account in the Kuali Financial Services system. The account information and a contact person in the customer’s organization are identified in the Cohesity set-up process. Monthly statements will be issued to that contact person for the organization’s records. This is the same process used for EZ-Backup and similar bill-back services like SFS and Managed Servers.
Most endpoint devices are eligible for Certified Desktop, which includes CrashPlan at a discounted rate. For use cases that are not part of Certified Desktop, CrashPlan is available for a monthly fee. The license structure for CrashPlan is user-based.
With Server Backup, each customer has a unique tenant and uses the Cohesity console to manage their own backups and restores. You can view and manage all your backups from this central console.
For data that requires long-term retention but has been removed from local storage, the solution may vary based on the particular guidelines for that data and retention. The initial planning sessions for your migration will address intricacies like this; schedule your first meeting now by emailing backup-modernization@cornell.edu.
We expect some data will be stored in Cohesity and cloud storage. A significantly reduced Spectrum Protect environment may be retained if we discover cases where moving the data is impractical.
EZ-Backup service functions will be moved to other services. These include:
Spectrum Protect’s EZ-Backup service uses locally-installed agents that push data to the backup infrastructure. Cohesity works in the opposite way—all your backup jobs are managed from a central console and the system pulls data from servers to the Cohesity infrastructure. This action requires an agent and additional inbound firewall rules to establish appropriate networking.
Cohesity’s backups are point-in-time based snapshots stored for a configurable time period. For example, in the Managed Server service, snapshots are completed each day and retained for 90 days, so there are 90 versions of the backup available. Retention policies are configurable. Spectrum Protect does not offer this option.
Cohesity supports image-based restores of hypervisors which can provide much faster recovery of VMs. Rather than having to install the OS, then apps, then restore data, Cohesity can restore the full image all at once. Spectrum Protect does not offer this option.
CIT maintains a local Cohesity cluster for campus customers in the Computing and Communications Center data center on campus. This is separate from the cluster that serves Managed Server and Shared File Services.
Data is backed up to Cohesity appliances and copied to Wasabi cloud storage for longer retention. In instances where data is unable to be moved to the cloud due to regulatory requirements, it is stored locally.
Before considering Cohesity’s Server Backup service as a potential replacement for EZ-Backup, CIT had experience using the vendor as the backup solution for the Managed Server and Shared File Services.
The project team will send regular updates to owners of servers on the legacy service by using the EZBACKUP-ANNOUNCE-L email distribution.
Other campus and IT news sources will be used to increase awareness about the transition and to inform new faculty and staff who may not realize this enterprise backup solution is available.
For more information, visit the EZ-Backup Modernization Project website or direct your questions to backup-modernization@cornell.edu.
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