NonStop data is important. It’s the lifeblood of business and has never had so much impact when it’s not available. However, not all NonStop data is equal. Restoration times should vary considerably for short-term, mid-term and long-term data requirements. When the NonStop backup data lifecycle is considered in terms of retention, it is critical that the backup data be protected and classified in terms of how it will be protected, how many copies of the data exist, and where the data will be stored.
This blog post examines the storage of data in different storage tiers, utilizing object storage locally as a private or public cloud thorough “storage tiering”. It examines the benefits and costs associated with tiered storage of backup data. NonStop Backup management responsible for their organizations’ data protection and compliance can evaluate the potential for applying storage tiering in their own NonStop landscape.
Storage tiering is the practice of taking specific backup data that is unlikely to change or be accessed and moves it to lower-cost storage or storage services (which can be in public or private clouds). When storage tiering is used, NonStop estates can implement long-term retention of selected backup data, making data recovery transparent to the NonStop VTC (Virtual Tape Controller), while also taking advantage of lower pricing. And, through ETI-NET’s BackBox® with QoreStor® automation, NonStop clients can enjoy these benefits with almost no manual intervention.
In most organizations, storage tiering is regarded as a way of lowering storage costs for older data. The older the data gets, the less likely anybody will change or even access it. Nevertheless, due in part to compliance requirements, NonStop data must be retained for multiple years, and in some extreme situations, decades. For example, to comply with regulations or to be prepared in case of an audit. With storage tiering, as data ages, you move it to progressively to lower cost and lower-performance media. This process frees up local BackBox with QoreStor, high-speed, primary backup storage for more recent data that may be accessed for faster recovery.
This process involves a delicate “balancing act” of ensuring the appropriate NonStop backup data resides in the correct storage tier. Leaving NonStop backup data in high-performance, low latency NonStop backup storage that nobody has accessed in three years unnecessarily increases storage, costs, management, as well as short-term capacity impact. Conversely, having to restore a data set that has been tiered not only impacts the retrieval time, can increase the cost considerably with public cloud providers in terms of egress fees.
That’s why storage tiering is a continual effort to ensure that the time thresholds are correctly set up to move backup data to the next tier at the appropriate time. While the timing will never be perfect, the objective is to configure NonStop Backup Data Jobs and BackBox with QoreStor data tiering as optimal as possible, to adjust as rarely as possible. NonStop environments need to avoid ending up with unbalanced storage, in which too much data is moved too quickly to low-cost media and recovery time objectives are impacted by slow retrieval.
Starting a NonStop storage tiering initiative involves considerable human interaction between business, operations, NonStop Backup and Storage administration. Understanding the types in terms of retention periods, and immutability are critical in the process. Then identifying how the DSM/TC pools and associated jobs are configured in terms of these policies govern the data stores / sets which BackBox and QoreStor utilize to perform data tiering, at the appropriate time and to which data tiering object storage environments. Over time, automation should guide the movement of NonStop backup data from one tier to another.
How will datasets be classified for tiering? Will all NonStop backup data such as $SYSTEM, NonStop SQL, TMS Logs, Applications and other files and folders by type, utilize tiering? Or by compliance, such as 30 days for immutable data, or seven-year data retention requirement? Or a mix of type and compliance.
In most cases, if a NonStop client needs to restore the data, it is typical that the restoration will occur within the first several months after creation. However, due to compliance requirements the data must be kept considerably longer. In this case the organization will want the data to reside on lower cost storage as it gets older. This is the premise for how to arrive at a policy to store the most recent 30 days of data locally. Then, as the NonStop backup data ages, setting the corresponding tiering policy to move the data elsewhere, whether to less expensive, on-premises object storage or to a private or public cloud service provider.
In wide brushstrokes, storage tiers can be broken down into:
As previously mentioned, incorrectly setting the tiering policy could cause restoration of recent NonStop backup data from the slower tier. Consider the age of the backup data retention and how much data may be required to restore at any one time. Will there be enough room for it on the primary backup storage as well as the NonStop Storage?
If part of the storage tiering system breaks; DSM/TC catalog as well as BackBox Data Stores have been removed, or fail due to ransomware? What happens to the data left on the other side of the breakage, is that data now effectively stranded? How to retrieve that data? Auditors won’t likely want to hear, “The data is there, however there is no way to actually retrieve it.”
Even secondary, low-performance and cost media should provide basic data management functionality. Across all tiers, are the data constructs self-describing? Can the BackBox and QoreStor system perform normal actions such as reattaching to the object storage to retrieve the NonStop backup data and create indexes?
Keeping all data in secondary backup storage will reduce costs over keeping it in primary backup storage. However, what will the organization do with the money saved? Once the data has been placed in the secondary storage, the organization has effectively freed up funds that can be reallocated to improve the Primary Backup Storage tier; for example, greater performance storage within the VTC with BackBox with QoreStor. One of the benefits of storage tiering is that it enables an organization to invest in improving performance in your production environment, reducing the time required to perform backups. This allows an organization to balance the cost of the tiering structure, based on where the NonStop data is located.
Accompanying NonStop data classification and policies regarding what data will be moved, is the cost-benefit element of storage tiering. What is the cost of keeping the wrong type of NonStop data in the wrong place? What’s the benefit of keeping the right data in the right place? The answers to those questions are quantifiable, with ramifications to the organization’s budget.
Even after data has been classified and decisions regarding where to put it in your storage tiering scheme, optimization is key to what data is stored where. Savings can be compounded further from warm and cold storage with technology that also optimizes the data set to further reduce costs.
The less data there is to move from one tier to the next, the lower the overall cost for storage and transfer. Deduplication is a proven technology for reducing the amount of data to back up and send over the network. Using algorithms, ETI-NET BackBox with QoreStor, scans the data and does not write blocks that have already been stored. It replaces them with a pointer to similar, backed-up data, and the pointer is used to rehydrate the deduplicated data later.
By reducing the net amount of data to be backed up before it goes to storage, significantly increases throughput and accelerate the movement of data. Combining deduplication with storage tiering – on-premises or through private or public cloud – paves the way to lower pricing with shorter retrieval time.
NonStop backup data that has been moved to secondary tiered storage is still identified in the DSM/TC catalog and can be retrieved, however at a slower retrieval rate. Different user expectations (and lack of patience) can prompt the organization to consider the benefits of storage tiering, however, don’t want slower retrieval times. Resolving this conundrum depends on the configuration used to optimize secondary storage.
It’s normal to expect an SLA from a service provider for cloud storage, however, there are important nuances to pay attention to.
Most Cloud Service providers offer an SLA on resilience, measured as a percentage of uptime – for example, 99.999% (“five nines”) – however that refers to infrastructure and accessibility. That does not extend to redundancy of the data stored in their cloud, nor to protection of NonStop backup data itself. For these situations, configuration of the replication between different “zones” is required.
While low storage costs are a key consideration, the hidden costs associated with retrieval or “Egress” have become a primary focus of the monthly storage cost. Utilizing BackBox with QoreStor, cloud storage consumption and monthly costs benefit from deduplication. However, understanding other charges include:
The main advantages include the following:
The essence of storage tiering is that not all NonStop backup data needs to reside on the BackBox Virtual Tape Controller with QoreStor. As NonStop data ages, the restoration access frequency diminishes. In an era of numerous options for storage, IT professionals turn to storage tiering and tools that automatically move data into progressively less-expensive tiers. Generally, the colder the storage, the longer the retrieval time when the data does need to be accessed, BackBox and QoreStor configured properly can help to address this concern. Successful storage tiering balances the expenditure amount to retain data against the time organizations require to recover it.
The ideal approach to tiered storage involves hybrid tools that move data programmatically between warmer and colder tiers, whether on premises or in the cloud. Moreover, after initial configuration, they allow for complete automation, moving the data without any manual intervention or ongoing human effort.
ETI-NET BackBox with QoreStor expands NonStop client’s data protection data tiering backup storage options while reducing storage footprint and overall infrastructure costs. This solution facilitates the adoption of most storage types, uniquely including local, private or public cloud storage as native object storage. QoreStor’s advanced compression and deduplication algorithms reduce storage requirements and costs anywhere it is deployed, even in the cloud. Best of all, ETI-NET’s BackBox with QoreStor includes ransomware protection and alerting capabilities to protect NonStop backup data and ensure fast recovery.
Director, Business Development
Management Tools and Storage
ETI-NET
ETI-NET is the worldwide leader in managing critical data for industries that never stop. We develop software which allows NonStop servers to access modern technologies. Now in our third decade of operation, ETI-NET is renowned for delivering leading-edge components to major data centers globally.
