Looking Back on 2020: Highlights in Backup and Recovery

By Karen Sherrill | December 15, 2020

Looking Back on 2020

Highlights in Backup and Recovery

Now that 2020 is coming to an end, it’s time to look back on some of the biggest backup and recovery release news: TrilioVault for RHV 4.0 and TrilioVault for OpenStack 4.0. 

Both solutions feature the key elements that have brought TrilioVault success. They are: 

  • Natively integrated
  • Non-disruptive
  • Agentless
  • Self-service
  • Scalable
  • Incremental forever

The Trilio team really kept its ear to the ground when developing both solutions, basing our design on the needs and experiences of our dedicated base of users. 

 

TrilioVault for OpenStack 4.0

Trilio’s first release was the backup and recovery platform for OpenStack, designed according to OpenStack principles to provide a truly cloud-native and integrated platform. While Trilio has since developed two other platforms, you never forget the first. TrilioVault for OpenStack 4.0 was designed based directly on feedback from users — their experiences, their problems and what they wanted to see next. TrilioVault for OpenStack’s new features are our response to our users.

  • Extended Support. This one takes us back even before the release of TrilioVault for OpenStack 4.0 to one of the biggest challenges faced by OpenStack customers this year: the need for support for all of the different distributions and versions of OpenStack. There wasn’t a definitive matrix available to users of TrilioVault, so Trilio developed TrilioVault for OpenStack 3.4 to resolve this problem. TrilioVault for OpenStack 3.4 supports Red Hat OpenStack platform, Canonical OpenStack, Ansible OpenStack and Kolla Ansible OpenStack from Queens to Stein. This year, Trilio made the decision to always qualify the second to last available version of all supported OpenStack distributions and maintain support for long term releases of Red Hat and Canonical. Thus, TrilioVault for Openstack 4.0 starts out by offering support for RHOSP13, RHOSP16, Canonical Queens, Canonical Train, Ansible Train and Kolla Ansible Train.
  • In-Place Rolling Upgrades and Updates. Upgrading and updating has gotten even easier with the new rolling upgrades and updates, which eliminate the need to uninstall the earlier version before upgrading. Furthermore, Trilio can now provide patches as packages so that you no longer need the Trilio Customer Success team to provide replacement files. At this point, the whole patching process becomes more predictable and easier to manage.
  • Architecture Change for TrilioVault API. The TrilioVault design has always evolved so that it can grow together with the OpenStack cloud. So, when Trilio discovered that some users were hitting 10,000 API calls per second, we immediately identified an opportunity to update TrilioVault to meet and exceed our customer’s needs. In TrilioVault for OpenStack 4.0, we changed the architecture to provide the TrilioVault API system with the same high availability and load balancing as the TrilioVault workload manager core service. 
  • Workload Quotas. This highly anticipated new feature was especially exciting for managed service providers (MSPs) and anyone with a cloud that operates internally like an MSP. The new workload quotas make it possible to define how many tenants can use backup and recovery. This functionality allows the OpenStack administrator to limit the number of workloads a tenant can have, set a maximum number of VMs to be protected and decide how much storage they can use on the backup target. As used from TrilioVault, the workload quota function is natively integrated into OpenStack, so OpenStack administrators can use Trilio Quota just like any other Quotas in OpenStack.
TrilioVault for RHV 4.0

In August, Red Hat released the anticipated Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) 4.4. As soon as Trilio heard from users that the new version of RHV was in demand, we set to work developing a version of TrilioVault that supports it. But, TrilioVault for RHV 4.0 is much more than just a way of bringing RHV 4.4 to TrilioVault. It also brings our users the new features and capabilities they were looking for.

  • The Admin Panel. Trilio designed the new Admin Panel for the administrators who wanted a high level overview of the status of their backup and recovery platform. While TrilioVault for RHV has always integrated into the RHV-M and provided an easy-to-use overview of all existing workloads, the new Admin Panel allows the user to see at a glance the status of their backups and storage as well as their overall data protection status. 
  • Email Alerting. TrilioVault for RHV already provided easy-to-integrate APIs that integrated with any monitoring solution to keep the user immediately informed should any backups or restores fail. However, because these APIs may not cover the needs of every single user — especially, those who want to be able to identify with certainty years later if a specific backup failed or succeeded — Trilio added email alerting to the version 4.0 release. Email alerting sends emails to whatever email address you provide detailing if a backup or restore succeeded or failed. These emails, aside from providing immediate updates, can also serve as a paper trail for anyone later on who wants to find out what happened.
  • Reporting. Trilio developed a new reporting functionality based on feedback from administrators who needed to provide daily reports about the backup and recovery platform. TrilioVault for RHV 4.0 includes a reporting functionality that makes it easy for administrators to generate and distribute reports showing not only the usage of the backup and recovery platform over time, but also the protection grade of the RHV environment and more.
  • New Supported Platform. In 2020, Trilio was approached by companies who used upstream Ovirt instead of RHV. Trilio decided to accommodate them, building TrilioVault for RHV 4.0 with the ability to work with oVirt 4.4 and providing backup and recovery to a host of new users.

As we head into 2021, and the new releases that are sure to come, take a moment to catch up with the latest releases from 2020. It’s time to learn more about TrilioVault for RHV 4.0 and TrilioVault for OpenStack 4.0.

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