Pipe Ten operates its own support services from DC0 Manchester, with customer’s services predominantly being deployed between DC1 Sheffield and DC2 Derby UK. Backup services are generally provided from the opposite data centre to which any customer’s active solution is deployed (DC1<>DC2) or from the shared backup services via DC0.
Our primary backup software and partner of choice is R1Soft. In simple terms R1Soft is a software agent installed to a servers operating system which creates frequent small backups of the servers state, drives and files and databases, then securely transfers them to the R1Soft backup software server where they reside fully encrypted until needed. When restoring backups we then have options surrounding restoration of the whole server, specific drives, files and even databases on a granular level for both type and date.
Self Backup
As part of any good disaster recovery and business continuity planning one should assume that a process or provider may fail and retain backups appropriate for the purpose.
While Pipe Ten and its backup services are reliable and regularly tested, we strongly believe and recommend customers should maintain local or cloud backups in addition to any backup services that we supply.
Pipe Ten is firmly committed to providing tools and resources to help customers achieve self backup for the purposes of disaster recovery.
Our default backup service profiles/settings (frequency and retention varies based on service type) are defined within the service appropriate backup policy (inclusive, shared or dedicated), these should be compared to your RTO and RPO to help define the (in)frequency of your own disaster recovery backups.
Additional network / bandwidth costs may be incurred and rate-limiting is recommended.
Inclusive Backup
Many services provided by Pipe Ten and the data which reside upon; include backup by default for example:
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- Shared Control Panel Configurations
- Shared Billing System Data
- Name Server Records
- Network device configuration
- Firewall device configuration
The amount of inclusive backup is defined within the terms for the service or are further defined within our Backup Policy linked below.
Shared Backup
The shared backup service provides easy-access to low cost off-site backups by way of an agent software installed to operating system, and a central backup server where the backups are scheduled, executed, securely stored and can be restored back to an operating system carrying the agent at all levels (baremetal/whole, drive, file, database).
AES-256 bit or better Encryption is used for BOTH communication between Agent <> Server AND while at-rest on Server. The decryption keys for which may be held solely by the customer, or more commonly both customer and Pipe Ten so we may best assist in any DR scenario.
A customer’s shared backup service will share hardware (compute/storage) resources with other customers on the shared backup service and include free inter-site bandwidth. As such the shared backup service carries fair-use fixed frequency/retention/priority profiles. Customers on dedicated backup services do not share any resources with other customers allowing complete customisation and guaranteed RTO.
Shared backup services are billable based on:
- Number of software agents/operating systems configured for protection / licensed
- Number of software agents/operating systems requiring automated or engineered patching services
- Total volume of shared backup server storage used each month
Dedicated Backup
Dedicated backup services provide access to off-site backups by way of a software agent installed to a customer’s operating system, and a private central backup server where the backups are scheduled, executed, securely stored and can be restored back to an operating system carrying the agent at all levels (baremetal/block, drive, file, database).
AES-256 bit or better Encryption is used for BOTH communication between Agent <> Server AND while at-rest on Server. The decryption keys for which may be held solely by the customer, or more commonly both customer and Pipe Ten so we may best assist in any DR scenario.
A customer’s dedicated backup service will not share hardware (compute/storage) resources with any other so allow unlimited customisation of frequency/retention/priority profiles and guaranteed RTO. Our shared backup services offer a lower TCO but with fewer guarantees.
Dedicated backup services are billable based on:
- Number of software agents/operating systems configured for protection / licensed
- Number of software agents/operating systems requiring automated or engineered patching services
- Number of backup servers required
- Compute resources required to support the backup servers
- Network resources required to support the backup servers locally or between sites
- Storage resources required to support the IO, Volumes and local redundancy required
Disaster Recovery & BCP
As good business practice and part of our ISO27001 obligations, Pipe Ten maintains DR & BCP planning for its own core infrastructure, staff, offices, billing and communications platforms.
Pipe Ten can also on-request assist with all elements of customer’s DR & BCP which may include helping to:
- Understand the capabilities inherent to the primary operating environment
- Understand the RTO and RPO appropriate to the customers need
- Define the options available within the primary operating environment
- Define the needs associated with any secondary or tertiary operating environments
- Reserve and Provision resources (physical, digital and human) to assist in critical events
- Holistically plan for DR events and the available path(s) to recovery
- Test DR planning and environments for speed, success and unexpected impacts
Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as Code or IaC, is the scripted management of infrastructure. Compute, Network, Storage and Software can be modelled, standardised, deployed, scaled and reproduced. IaC enables:
- Consistency/Standardisation
- Reproduction/Repetition
- Scaling/Stability
- Documentation/Compliance/Security
Documentation as Code – When your infrastructure has been developed as code, you’ve already documented most of your infrastructure.
DR/BCP as Code – When your infrastructure is documented as code, it can more easily and quickly be reproduced and redeployed to the same provider or alternates in the event of failure.
Scaling as Code – When your infrastructure is automated as code, it can more easily be redeployed and scaled up or down in accordance with the demand of its users.
Audit & Compliance as Code – When your infrastructure is consistent and documented, it can be more easily be audited and shown to be compliant with standards.
Pipe Ten uses terraform, vault, ansible and other products to automate its environments and can help your development teams deploy Infrastructure as code for our private cloud or public clouds such as Azure.
Classification: Public
Last saved: 2024/03/11 at 22:20 by Carl