Skip to main content

Hello everyone,

I am trying to push the company I work for into retiring Tape Backups and get more into cloud storage.  I am working with our Reps for pricing, but I do have one question that I know will come up to a degree.  Currently we backup our VM’s over multiple tapes,  The jobs do a few VM’s depending on what they do so one job may backup 7-10 VMs and span them over a tape or two.  If we point these Aux to the Cloud instead of tape when I go to restore from the Metallic Recovery Reserve will Commvault need to download the entire “tape” of that backup or can it pick what it needs from that one file?  Also if it does have to download everything where does that get stored while its restoring.  The reason I ask is if I will need to redo my VM backups and just put them all on separate jobs.  It may be a simple question but I figured I would ask here about it.  Thank you for any info you can give.

Hi @Heath 

 

Treat MRR cloud storage like disk storage. There are some fundamental differences however it is much more similar to disk than to tape. Tapes are sequential media with limited size and thus have physical “container” characterizations resulting in need to read data in a certain way/order and move across to different tapes for different data. 

 

Disk and Cloud do not have this limitation and are thus non sequential (random IO accessible). So for a restore, it will only need to “read” all the data block needed for the VM itself and not needing to traverse across blocks for all your other VM’s/jobs. 

 

Depending on the cloud storage tier, most of the time this restore should be faster than tape (assuming tape was multiplexed and spanned multiple media per job and network bandwidth to cloud is fast enough).

 

You can check out MRR cost calculator compared with public and on premise solutions here: https://www.commvault.com/metallic-cloud-storage

Thank you @Jordan 

That helps me understand it alot better.  The only time we plan on really using the cold storage cloud part is during our DR test or sadly if we have to have a real DR for some reason, I just wanted to make sure I understood that even though the backup does 5 VM’s I can do restores on as many as I want and only limitation would be in theory my internet connection.  Thanks again for the info.

Hi @Heath 

 

Yes, that is correct, you can now do restores to all 5 VM’s concurrently whereas on tape you may need to wait for each one to complete before next one can be started. 

 

For real DR situation too, ideally you would want to do public cloud vendor tools to migrate your cold storage data to hot storage for fastest restore times. For DR Test, this may not be necessary if time to recall from cold storage is reasonable and DR Test project does not have very short time windows. 

Reply


Terms & ConditionsCookie settings