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Druva Documentation

Archived release notes until 2020

December 17, 2020

New Feature

Configure Multiple AWS Accounts

The Multi-Account Onboarding feature allows you to configure multiple AWS accounts simultaneously on Druva CloudRanger.

Key advantages:

  • Simplified configuration at an organization level
  • Configure multiple AWS accounts using CloudFormation StackSets
  • Setup notifications when a new account is configured, deleted, or updated

Configure Multiple Accounts using StackSets

The new feature allows you to quickly configure multiple AWS accounts simultaneously using a CloudFormation StackSet. In other words, you can add multiple AWS Account numbers to a StackSet and then synchronize them with Druva CloudRanger.

The CloudFormation templates are available under the Manage Multiple AWS Accounts on your Organization Settings page.

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Setup Notifications

Once you add a new AWS account, you can manage notifications to be triggered by Druva CloudRanger, as well as define intended recipients or webhooks. Notifications are triggered when a new account is configured, deleted. Updated, or when account access is removed.

Note: Notifications here apply at the organization level, unlike those within the Account Settings page that are specific to a particular AWS account.

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For more information, please see Configure Multiple AWS Accounts.

 

October 8, 2020

New Feature

Archive EBS Snapshots to Amazon S3 Storage

Enterprises often need to retain long-term backups for business continuity, compliance, customer contracts, and e-Discovery. Storage optimization is an ongoing process of evaluating your data storage needs and choosing a cost-effective AWS storage option that meets business needs. However, AWS does not currently offer an out of box low-cost storage tier for EBS snapshots.

Druva CloudRanger now allows you to transition your Amazon EBS snapshots to Amazon S3 storage classes such as Amazon S3 Glacier and Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, significantly reducing costs while retaining long-term availability.

The availability of this feature may be limited based on the license type, region, and other criteria. To access this feature, contact your Druva Account Manager or Druva Support.

Key Advantages

Archiving EBS snapshots to S3 offers the following benefits:

  • Cost benefits: Transitioning snapshots to lower-cost storage offers significant savings on long-term retention.
  • Recovery: Seamless recovery of individual files or snapshots from S3.
  • File-level search in snapshots: Metadata-based file search to locate files from the snapshots, without having to recover snapshots in S3.

You can manually archive EBS snapshots to one of the AWS Storage Class. For more information on available AWS storage classes, please refer to the AWS documentation.

Note: The Archive Snapshots to S3 feature is currently available only for EC2 snapshots and AMIs. To know more, see Archive EBS Snapshots to Amazon S3 Storage.

October 7, 2020

New Feature

Amazon DynamoDB Support on AWS GovCloud

With this release, Druva CloudRanger for AWS GovCloud now brings support for Amazon DynamoDB, with the following key advantages:

  • One integrated console to manage DynamoDB tables from multiple AWS GovCloud accounts.
  • Protect Amazon DynamoDB resources by Tags, IDs, or by AWS account or region.
  • Automated policy-based backup and tiered retention for Amazon DynamoDB tables in multiple accounts and regions.
  • Cross-region restore of Amazon DynamoDB tables.
Before you begin

To begin using this feature, you will need to grant Druva CloudRanger access to your Amazon DynamoDB tables by updating the IAM role configured for your AWS GovCloud account access. Use the CloudFormation URL on your Druva CloudRanger account to update your AWS stack, which will add a new rule for DynamoDB permissions.

The Sync ​functionality allows you to then synchronize your AWS environment with Druva CloudRanger. Once the synchronization is complete, all resources are highlighted with a green checkmark. This validates that your Amazon DynamoDB Tables and Backups are now synchronized with Druva CloudRanger.

Protect and Manage Resources

The Resources widget on the Dashboard displays the number of protected DynamoDB resources on Druva CloudRanger.

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An integrated view of Amazon DynamoDB tables across AWS GovCloud regions is available on the Resources page.

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You may drill down by resource type or apply appropriate filters, including Backup Protection Status, Region, or Tags to view specific DynamoDB tables. Use the Configure Policy functionality to define a backup policy for a specific DynamoDB resource.

Global Backup Policies for Amazon DynamoDB

With this release, Druva CloudRanger for AWS GovCloud now allows you to configure backup policies to protect your Amazon DynamoDB tables.

Global backup policies offer the following advantages:

  • Automate your backup schedule with tiered retention for backups.
  • Backup encryption using Amazon default keys or KMS encryption.
  • Backup of Tags on DynamoDB tables.
  • Search functionality using Table names and Region filters.

Amazon DynamoDB Backup and Restore Workflow

With this release, you can easily backup and restore your Amazon DynamoDB resources on Druva CloudRanger. Here are a few benefits:

  • On-demand and automated policy-based backups.
  • Backups of encrypted as well as global tables.
  • Cross-region restore options for DynamoDB tables.

Note: Backups will be managed based on the table size.

The Restores page displays all DynamoDB backups that have been restored on Druva CloudRanger for AWS GovCloud.

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The status of all Backup and Restore jobs initiated are available on the Jobs page.

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September 30, 2020

Enhancements

Cross-Account Reports

With this release, Druva CloudRanger brings to you an end-to-end reporting functionality, wherein you can generate and customize reports for Backup and Restore status, Schedules, and Disaster Recovery Plans across AWS accounts. The new capabilities include a revamped Reports navigation menu at the global level.

To view and generate reports, navigate to Global > Reports.

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To know more, please see Reports.

Navigational Updates

Reports are now available within the Global menu, allowing visibility and management across accounts.

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Note: Do note that the Reports menu (previously available at the Account level) is now available under the Global menu.

Report Subscriptions

You can now subscribe to specific reports as part of monitoring and compliance. Go ahead and create email schedules for periodic delivery of specific reports to chosen recipients.

You can generate and manage subscriptions to the following reports:

  • Resource Schedule
  • Resource Restore Status
  • Resource Protection Status:
  • Resource Backup Status
  • DR Plan

With this release, the Backup Policy Report has been overhauled.

The Subscriptions page displays a summary of report subscriptions, email recipients, and the subscription schedule. You can view, edit, or delete subscriptions, as well as manage a particular recipient’s subscription.

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For more information on report subscriptions, please see Reports.

 

August 31, 2020

New Feature

Amazon DynamoDB Support

With this release, Druva CloudRanger now brings support for Amazon DynamoDB, with the following key advantages:

  • One integrated console to manage DynamoDB tables from multiple AWS accounts.
  • Protect Amazon DynamoDB resources by Tags, IDs, or by AWS account or region.
  • Automated policy-based backup and tiered retention for Amazon DynamoDB tables in multiple accounts and regions.
  • Cross-region restore of Amazon DynamoDB tables.
Before you begin

To begin using this feature, you will need to grant Druva CloudRanger access to your Amazon DynamoDB tables by updating the IAM role configured for your AWS account access. Use the CloudFormation URL on your CloudRanger account to update your AWS stack, which will add a new rule for DynamoDB permissions.

The Sync functionality allows you to then synchronize your AWS environment with Druva CloudRanger. To initiate Sync with AWS, click the Refresh icon on the left navigation panel.

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Once the synchronization is complete, all resources are highlighted with a green checkmark. This validates that your Amazon DynamoDB Tables and Backups are now synchronized with Druva CloudRanger.

Protect and Manage Resources

The Resources widget on the Dashboard displays the number of protected DynamoDB resources on Druva CloudRanger.

Dashboard1.png

An integrated view of Amazon DynamoDB tables across AWS regions is available on the Resources page.

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You may drill down by resource type or apply appropriate filters, including Backup Protection Status, Region, or Tags to view specific DynamoDB tables.

Use the Configure Policy functionality to define a backup policy for a specific DynamoDB resource.

Global Backup Policies for Amazon DynamoDB

With this release, Druva CloudRanger now allows you to configure backup policies to protect your Amazon DynamoDB tables.

Global backup policies offer the following advantages:

  • Automate your backup schedule with tiered retention for backups.
  • Backup encryption using Amazon default keys or KMS encryption.
  • Backup of Tags on DynamoDB tables.
  • Search functionality using Table names and Region filters.

Use the Add Resources option on a pre-existing global backup policy to specify DynamoDB services to be backed-up.

Amazon DynamoDB Backup and Restore Workflow

With this release, you can easily backup and restore your Amazon DynamoDB resources on Druva CloudRanger. Here are a few benefits:

  • On-demand and automated policy-based backups.
  • Backups of encrypted as well as global tables.
  • Cross-region restore options for DynamoDB tables.

Note: DynamoDB backups will be managed based on the table size.

The Restores page displays all DynamoDB backups that have been restored on Druva CloudRanger.

Rest1.png

The status of all Backup and Restore jobs initiated are available on the Jobs page.

Job1.png

 

July 29, 2020

New Feature

AWS GovCloud Parity for Global Backup Policies and Disaster Recovery 2.0

With this release, Druva CloudRanger for AWS GovCloud now brings Global Backup Policies at the organization level and Automated Disaster Recovery.

Global Backup Policies in AWS GovCloud

The backup policies can now be configured at the organization level, which allows you to define one backup policy for all AWS accounts within an organization.

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This enhancement brings two key elements:

  • Navigational updates with a global Backup Policies menu, for visibility and management across accounts
  • Backup policy updates to set up cross-account policies and tiered retention settings

You can now customize your retention settings based on business requirements, while also realizing significant cost savings. For more information, see Global Backup Policies.

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Disaster Recovery 2.0

With this release, we now bring AWS GovCloud support for DR 2.0. The new capabilities include the revamped navigation menu and enhancements to the DR workflow to simplify your disaster recovery planning. Disaster Recovery 2.0 streamlines the current DR mechanism, right from creating the DR plan to the actual failover.

Druva CloudRanger DR 2.0 features include:

  • AWS cross-account disaster recovery plans
  • Real-time feedback on your backup strategy meeting your Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
  • Enhanced testing options
  • Flexibility in choosing instance sizes for disaster recovery
  • Immediate results view
  • Support for Amazon RDS resources as part of DR plans

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The new DR 2.0 workflow involves the creation of Environments and DR Plans.

Environments

The first step to setting up Disaster Recovery 2.0 is to create environments. An environment is a collection of AWS network and security resources for an application within a single region. Environments are just a logical grouping of your resources that makes disaster recovery straightforward and flexible.

Here are a few benefits:

  • Environments can be cloned across your AWS accounts and regions.
  • Environments improve the reusability of grouped resources to support additional scenarios, such as creating production-like environments for development and quality assurance.
  • An environment simplifies the generation of dependencies for an application, ensuring it can be updated or cloned seamlessly.

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DR Plans

Once you create an environment, the next step is to create your DR plan.

You can create disaster recovery plans based on the Service Level Objectives (SLOs) of your business, that is, the RPO and RTO. You can also automate your DR plans and test them for BCP readiness and optimize them based on your needs.

DR plans bring added advantages:

  • Simple and automated: Create DR environments automatically and set up your DR plans.
  • Flexible: Create cross-region and cross-account DR plans.
  • Cost-effective: Choose multiple EC2 instances to test your DR solution in a cost-optimized manner. This saves you the hassle of setting up additional DR infrastructure and minimizes associated costs.

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April 7, 2020

Enhancement

Global backup policies

With this release, the backup policies are now available on an organization level, which means that you can now have one policy for all your AWS accounts within an organization.

There are two key enhancements

  • Navigation updates with a global menu for visibility and management across accounts
  • Backup policy updates to set up cross-account policies and tiered retention settings

Save on cost, and customize your retention settings based on your preferences. For more information, see Global Backup Policies.

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Alert! - End of Life for Legal Hold 

The Legal Hold feature on Druva CloudRanger has reached its end of life. For more information, contact Druva Support.

November 21, 2019

New feature

CloudRanger now supports AWS GovCloud regions

Taking regular snapshots of your data is the logical first step for any robust data protection strategy for AWS GovCloud. However, there is a need for the snapshot management capabilities for AWS backups and a complete solution that keeps your AWS GovCloud data safe and easily recoverable from any scenario. Good news! CloudRanger now supports  AWS GovCloud regions for backup and recovery of AWS workloads, which will allow US government agencies and customers to avail the benefits of data protection services for AWS environments.

This feature brings to you a wide range of capabilities and benefits such as backup and recovery, AMIs, centralized global management, alerts and reporting, and governance and compliance. 

For more information about this feature, see https://cloudranger.com/aws-govcloud-backup/. You can learn more about the availability and location of AWS GovCloud regions here. Here's a sneak peek of the CloudRanger GovCloud dashboard. 

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Note: Contact Druva sales for licensing information and sign-ups. 

October 3, 2019

New feature

Disaster Recovery 2.0

When you think of disaster recovery, the first thing that comes to mind is whether or not the disaster recovery system you’ve chosen can give you fool-proof assurance about your data’s safety. Add to that the benefits and flexibility of setting up the granular details, you are sure to become, let’s just say - Happy! 

Here's some exciting news! With DR 2.0, we’ve taken several steps towards making your DR mechanism, right from creating a DR plan to a failover, as simple as possible. The new capabilities include a revamped left navigation menu and significant DR workflow enhancements to make your disaster recovery planning even easier.

Druva CloudRanger DR 2.0 features include

  • ​​​​​​AWS cross-account disaster recovery plans
  • Intelligent real-time feedback confirming or otherwise, your backup strategy meets your Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
  • Enhanced testing options
  • Flexibility in choosing instance sizes for disaster recovery
  • Immediate results view
  • Support for Amazon RDS resources as part of DR plans

If you are already an existing customer with DR plans, DR 2.0 is currently not available to you. We will be in contact with you shortly to migrate your DR plans to the new version. 

 

 

 

New Disaster Recovery (DR) plan workflow includes environments and DR plans

Environments

The first thing you need to do to set up DR 2.0 is to create environments. An environment is a collection of AWS network and security resources for an application within a single region. But what’s the point of doing this, you might ask? Simplification and flexibility!  Environments are just a way of grouping your resources in a way that makes sense for you. Here are a few benefits:

  • An environment simplifies the generation of dependencies for an application, ensuring it can be updated or cloned seamlessly. 

  • It also helps departments such as development and quality assurance with the reusability of grouping resources to support additional scenarios, such as creating production-like environments easily.

  • Environments can be cloned across your AWS accounts and regions.

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DR plans

After you create an environment, creating a DR plan is your next step. You can now create disaster recovery plans based on your business service level objectives (SLOs) that are, RPO and RTO. You can also automatically test DR plans for readiness and optimize them based on your needs. But are we done with listing what you can do with the DR plans? Not yet! Take a look at the benefits:

  • Simple and automated: Create your DR environments automatically and set up your DR plans much easier than before.

  • Flexible: Create cross-region and/or cross-account DR plans.

  • Cost-effective: Choose various types of EC2 instances to test your DR solution in a cost-optimized manner. You no more have the hassle of spending on setting up your DR infrastructure setup. 

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September 5, 2019

Enhancement

Changes in navigation

Druva CloudRanger has had a big visual makeover! Our navigation changes include a cleaner look-and-feel, new navigation, an easier way to to see app information and more. Here are the changes:

  • Most notably, Servers, have now been renamed to Resources, as this covers Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon Neptune and Amazon Aurora. As a result, Server Scheduling can now be found under Policies > Resources Schedules.
  • We have added the Infrastructure tab to the top-left navigation, where you can access all resources linked to your AWS account.
  • We have also introduced the Environments section within Infrastructure, which allows you to clone your AWS environments to be used as part of a Disaster Recovery plan.
  • We have made it easier to access Restores via the main navigation menu, with Jobs, Audit trails, and Reports now available in the Activity category.

The new navigation menu is now live across for all Druva CloudRanger customers. If you have any questions related to the new navigation, please contact our customer support team via email cr-support@druva.com or through the 24/7 chat within the Druva Cloudranger console.

You may need to refresh your browser to see the new changes in the Druva CloudRanger dashboard.

June 5, 2019

Enhancement

Self-configuration of auto-sync time

With this release, we have simplified the process of updating the auto-sync time of your AWS account. You can now update it on your own. 

To do this, simply go to Account Settings and select a preferred time for auto-sync on the AUTO SYNC TIME  drop-down list. 

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April 18, 2019

New feature

New CloudRanger onboarding process

CloudRanger now has a simpler, more intuitive onboarding process to get you set up in minutes by simply connecting to your AWS account via an IAM role. This update makes a new user's experience more seamless and structured.

For more details, refer to Create a CloudRanger account.

March 14, 2019

New feature

Onboarding policy template

When a user clicks to create a new backup policy, they are now presented with a pop-up window containing four templates, which can be used to create the new policy.

Templates available to the user are as follows:

  • Twice Daily: Create backups twice per day and retain for seven days.

  • Daily: Create daily backups and retain for one week.

  • Weekly: Create weekly backups and retain for one month.

  • Monthly: Create monthly backups and retain for three months.

This feature enables the user to create a backup policy with minimal effort; hence, saving them time and effort. A random CRON value is generated for each template to ensure that policies are fired at different times and not all at once, which is important for the performance and execution of CloudRanger users' policies.

The templates are also automatically tagged indicating the type of template used when creating the policy, for example, TwiceDailyTemplate. This helps the users to distinguish between policies created using templates and policies created manually.

The user can also continue without using a template for more complex policies by clicking Continue without using template.

Enhancements

Cross-account billing AMI copy

This enhancement allows users to copy AMIs with marketplace product codes across AWS accounts using a method recommended by AWS. By default, this is disabled to stop users from circumventing increased pricing for launching instances from these AMIs. With this enhancement, CloudRanger users gain the ability to copy these kinds of AMIs across AWS accounts while the product codes do not get lost.
This has been achieved by privately sharing the AMI with the target AWS account, launching an instance from that AMI and then creating a new AMI from the newly launched instance.

To copy a shared AMI with a billing product code, launch an EC2 instance in your account using the shared AMI and then create an AMI from the instance.
For more details, refer to the AWS Documentation

Users who have seen the following error message before: “Images from AWS Marketplace cannot be copied to another AWS account” will now see this copy attempt complete successfully rather than result in a failure.

Cross-account encrypted snapshots and AMIs

This enhancement to the CloudRanger policy allows users to specify a KMS key to encrypt with when backing up data to another AWS account. Keeping data encrypted in the cloud is of the utmost importance for many cloud users. Users can now modify their backup policies and in the copy section, they can choose target encryption keys. They also need to grant the CloudRanger role for the target AWS account access to the KMS in the source AWS account.

Notes:

  • As a prerequisite, users must share the encrypted key of source account with cross accounts to copy encrypted snapshots. For more information on how to share keys across accounts, see the AWS documentation
  • If the KMS permissions have not been granted by default to CloudRanger as part of account configuration, perform the steps listed in  AWS configuration to enable cross-region copy of encrypted snapshots to do so.

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Backup policy - scheduling multiple days in a week

CloudRanger now supports setting a backup schedule for multiple days in a week.

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February 27, 2019

Enhancements

Enhanced file-level restore

Indexed snapshots contents can now be browsed from file-level restore of a snapshot. Additional options to search for the index and download files within a snapshot are also now supported.

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Advanced snapshot restore options

Restore of a snapshot as an instance now supports options to specify the instance architecture.

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Network settings in File Search settings

A new section Network Settings has been added within Account Settings > File Search Settings to specify the subnets for file indexer to run.

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New region support

CloudRanger now supports AWS region ‘Stockholm’ (eu-north-1).

Fixed issues

None

Known issues

None

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