The Importance of Integrating Storage Tiering into your HPE NonStop Backup Strategy

When not all NonStop data needs the same level of protection

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.

What are the main considerations in an HPE NonStop backup data tiering strategy? 

Capacity

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?

Breakage

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.”

Media

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?

Investment

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.

Budgeting

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.

Deduplication

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.

Time to retrieve

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.

Conclusion 

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.

To read this article in full, please follow this link to the ETI-NET web site –

https://etinet.com/resources/the-importance-of-integrating-storage-tiering-into-your-hpe-nonstop-backup-strategy/