Amazon Offers New Options for Disaster Recovery Operations

Author: erics, Posted December 18th, 2012 at 7:29:36am

Today AWS announced the ability to copy EBS snapshots to other regions, with the ability to copy AMIs coming soon. This is a HUGE improvement, and one that will allow IT architects to create automated DR solutions across AWS regions providing significant resilience against outages.

Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,

We are delighted to announce the immediate availability of a new feature Elastic Block Store (EBS) Snapshot Copy. EBS Snapshot Copy enables you to copy your EBS snapshots across AWS regions, thus making it easier for you to leverage multiple AWS regions and accelerate your geographical expansion, data center migration and disaster recovery.

EBS Snapshot Copy is simple to use. In the AWS Management Console, you can select the snapshot to be copied, set the destination region, and start the copy. This feature can also be accessed via an EC2 Command Line Interface or an EC2 API as described in the EBS Snapshot Copy page. The copied snapshot behaves the same as other snapshots in the destination region: it can be used to create new EBS volumes which can then be attached to an EC2 instance in the destination region.

You will be charged only for the data transferred to copy the snapshot and to store the copied snapshot at the destination region.

We also plan to launch Amazon Machine Image (AMI) Copy as a follow-up to this feature, which will enable you to copy both public and custom-created AMIs across regions.

You can learn more about EBS and this feature by visiting the Amazon EBS Documentation.

Sincerely,
The Amazon EC2 Team

Categories: Technology Tags: Amazon, AWS, Copy, EBS, Region, Snapshot