Notre Dame uses N2WS Cloud Protection Manager for backup

Coinciding with its decision to eventually close its data center and migrate most of its workloads to the public cloud, the University of Notre Dame's IT team switched to cloud-native data protection.

Notre Dame, based in Indiana, began its push to move its business-critical applications and workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2014. Soon after, the university chose N2WS Cloud Protection Manager to handle backup and recovery.

Now, 80% of the applications used daily by faculty members and students, as well as the data associated with those services, lives on the cloud. The university protects more than 600 AWS instances, and that number is growing fast.

In a recent webinar, Notre Dame systems engineer Aaron Wright talked about the journey of moving a whopping 828 applications to the cloud, and protecting those apps and their data.  

N2WS, which was acquired by Veeam earlier this year, is a provider of cloud-native, enterprise backup and disaster recovery for AWS. The backup tool is available through the AWS Marketplace.

Wright said Notre Dame's main impetus for migrating to the cloud was to lower costs. Moving services to the cloud would reduce the need for hardware. Wright said the goal is to eventually close the university's on-premises primary data center.

"We basically put our website from on premises to the AWS account and transferred the data, saw how it worked, what we could do. ... As we started to see the capabilities and cost savings [of the cloud], we were wondering what we could do to put not just our 'www' services on the cloud," he said.

Wright said Notre Dame plans to move 90% of its applications to the cloud by the end of 2018. "The data center is going down as we speak," he said.

We looked at what it would cost us to build our own backup software and estimated it would cost 4,000 hours between two engineers.

As a research organization that works on projects with U.S. government agencies, Notre Dame owns sensitive data. Wright saw the need for a centralized backup software to protect that data, and found N2WS Cloud Protection Manager through AWS Marketplace. Wright could not find many good commercial options for protecting that cloud data.

"We looked at what it would cost us to build our own backup software and estimated it would cost 4,000 hours between two engineers," he said. By comparison, Wright said his team deployed Cloud Protection Manger in less than an hour.

Wright said N2WS Cloud Protection Manager rescued Notre Dame's data at least twice since the installation. One came after Linux machines failed to boot after application of a patch, and engineers restored data from snapshots within five minutes. Wright said his team used the snapshots to find and detach a corrupted Amazon Elastic Block Store volume, and then manually created and attached a new volume.

In another incident, Wright said the granularity of the N2WS Cloud Protection Manager backup capabilities proved valuable.

"Back in April-May 2018, we had to do a single-file restore through Cloud Protection Manager. Normally, we would have to have taken the volume and recreated a 300-gig volume," he said. Locating and restoring that single file so quickly allowed him to resolve the incident within five minutes.