Review of Automated, Secure, Reliable, & Distributed Backup of MER Tactical Data on Clouds

The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Project in 2010 became the first to include the public cloud on is every day mission-critical operations. Lower cost could systems developed by MER have transitioned tactical data onto lower cost storage system environments.

The main goal of all backup systems are to increase the effectiveness of durability as much as possible. "Availability measures the reliability of the data store and the likelihood of which data will be available." The goal more specifically is to minimize cost significantly when compared to conservative IT solutions.

The workflow system allows the system to automatically backup, audit, and complete a system recovery. The interested parties will receive the output of each backup run by email. Discrepancies between the audit report and archive are noted and another backup process starts to refresh the cloud backup. "Finally, the recovery to storage is to perform a full restoration of files in the archive.

The process has shown promising results, extremely high performance for backups and recovery have been acknowledged. multi-threaded transfer client was able to give us transfer rates that far

exceed common means archiving data:

•Parallel transfers to S3: 70MB/s sustained

•External USB hard drives: 60MB/s sustained (theoretical based on USB specifications)

•DVD writer at 24x: 31 MB/s sustained(theoretical) 

 

"The backup process to the cloud, along with the variable cost model of cloud storage, provides a compelling alternative to traditional backup processes. The optimized data transfer client can support speeds that exceed

common data backup strategies such as using an external hard drive and DVD archiving."

REFERENCES

[1]Microsoft Azure Web Site:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/features/storage/

[2]Amazon S3

Web Site: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

[3]CNSS Policy No. 15, Fact Sheet 1. National Policy on the

Use of the AES Standard to Protect National Security

Systems and National Security Information.

http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/STM/cmvp/documents/CNSS15FS.pdf