CrashPlan
CrashPlan is a cloud based backup service. The Oxford University service backs up to data centres in Ireland.
Authentication to the service uses the Oxford Single Sign On. To use the service you therefore need both an Oxford SSO and a corresponding account created on the CrashPlan service.
The HFS Hub (communicating with the HFS Portal) creates an account for you on the CrashPlan service during installation of the CrashPlan client (assuming you have logged in with your SSO and have a University card status that entitles you to use the service).
For information on how CrashPlan works see the page CrashPlan Architecture on the CrashPlan web site and links therein.
Storage Protect
The Storage Protect service is provided by IBM Storage Protect servers running on AIX or Linux on IBM Power systems. There are a number of primary servers which receive the incoming backups. These then replicate the back up data to two other servers, in two other data centres, thus providing three copies of the data. The first two copies are held on disk based storage. The third copy is held in off site cloud storage using object lock to add immutability to the copy. Although the third copy is off site it is encrypted with keys that are held on the Storage Protect servers in an Oxford data centre.
Clients (nodes) back up to the primary server where the data is stored on disk. Data deduplication and compression is used to reduce both the amount of storage space required on disk and the amount of data that needs to be transferred from the client. After deduplication and compression the data is encrypted for storage on disk.
Once a day new data on the primary is replicated to the second and third copy replica servers. Storage Protect supports automatic failover for restore so should the primary server be unavailable clients can still restore their data from the secondary copy. The third copy would only be used in extreme circumstances.
