SysCloud Reduces Costs and Increases Performance at Scale for SaaS Data Backups on AWS

Founded in 2013, SysCloud provides an intelligent cloud backup solution supporting users across 32 countries. Its primary customers are digital-native businesses and K–12 educational institutions. Before migrating to AWS in 2014, SysCloud initially provided backup solutions for customers’ on-premises storage systems. “A customer would install our previous product in their data center and perform the backup on their own,” says Vikram Srinivasan, head of cloud operations at SysCloud. “This process made code maintenance difficult and required customers to perform manual updates.” SysCloud then chose to transform its on-premises cloud backup solution into a SaaS offering.

 

SysCloud’s SaaS cloud backup solution was initially built using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), a simple, scalable, high-performance block-storage service designed for Amazon EC2. After the migration, however, the company began to experience rapid growth. Because SysCloud had already migrated to AWS, the organization was able to identify an innovative way to support its growing data storage needs. In 2018, SysCloud began searching for a higher-throughput, lower-latency solution on AWS, leading it to FSx for Lustre. “Our backup solution on FSx for Lustre operates at 99.99 percent availability,” says Raghavendra Sirsi, chief operations officer at SysCloud. “This solution has helped us deliver a reliable cloud backup service to our customers.”

After migrating to FSx for Lustre, SysCloud began to use Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, which let developers take advantage of unused Amazon EC2 capacity in the cloud. Instead of planning for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances in advance, the company can scale its FSx for Lustre usage as needed, reducing its provisioning costs by 30 percent. “We solve a lot of problems by scaling on demand,” says Vikram. “We don’t have to worry about the number of users or data volume. We simply provision the process, and the backups happen seamlessly.” Using FSx for Lustre, SysCloud can scale with ease to support new customers and back up their data rapidly, improving onboarding speeds by 300 percent.

 

SysCloud stores petabytes of data on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, durability, security, and performance. To store historical data, the company uses Amazon S3 Glacier (S3 Glacier), a secure, durable, and low-cost Amazon S3 cloud storage class for data archiving and long-term backup. This solution further optimizes SysCloud’s resources, reducing storage costs by 70 percent. “Using Amazon S3 and S3 Glacier, our solution becomes simple and seamless,” says Babu Chimata, chief technology officer at SysCloud. “We have the ability to access the data that we need, when we need it.”

 

SysCloud uses FSx for Lustre to store data in transit, moving files to S3 Standard, S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA), and S3 Glacier based on certain business rules. As a result, SysCloud can securely retain files for a longer period and help users retrieve their data on demand at a faster speed, improving system performance. When retrieving data from S3 Glacier, SysCloud uses multiple S3 Glacier retrieval options to match its data access requirements, which vary from minutes to hours. For example, if SysCloud needs to retrieve data quickly, it can use Expedited retrievals, which make data available in just a few minutes for all but the largest archives. To make its large request jobs more cost efficient, SysCloud uses Bulk retrievals, the lowest-cost S3 Glacier retrieval option, which can make very large amounts of data available in a few hours. Using S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier retrieval options, SysCloud can reduce its data request costs by up to 15 percent. “Previously, we would upload files from the customer and move them to Amazon S3 immediately,” says Vikram. “But submitting individual requests for each file increased our data request costs. By storing data in transit on FSx for Lustre, we were able to save money. We also improved our backup and restore speeds because we group the same types of files together in transit.”

 

SysCloud also uses AWS CloudTrail, a service that facilitates governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of AWS accounts, to meet its clients’ auditing requirements. “Using AWS Storage services, we can show our customers that our solution can comply with the security and compliance requirements that they are asking us to meet,” says Vikram.