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When to use Cloud Storage Pools

Contributors netapp-madkat
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Cloud Storage Pools can provide significant benefits in several use cases.

Backing up StorageGRID data in an external location

You can use a Cloud Storage Pool to back up StorageGRID objects to an external location.

If the copies in StorageGRID are inaccessible, the object data in the Cloud Storage Pool can be used to serve client requests. However, you might need to issue S3 POST Object restore request to access the backup object copy in the Cloud Storage Pool.

The object data in a Cloud Storage Pool can also be used to recover data lost from StorageGRID because of a storage volume or Storage Node failure. If the only remaining copy of an object is in a Cloud Storage Pool, StorageGRID temporarily restores the object and creates a new copy on the recovered Storage Node.

To implement a backup solution:

  1. Create a single Cloud Storage Pool.

  2. Configure an ILM rule that simultaneously stores object copies on Storage Nodes (as replicated or erasure-coded copies) and a single object copy in the Cloud Storage Pool.

  3. Add the rule to your ILM policy. Then, simulate and activate the policy.

Tiering data from StorageGRID to external location

You can use a Cloud Storage Pool to store objects outside of the StorageGRID system. For example, suppose you have a large number of objects that you need to retain, but you expect to access those objects rarely, if ever. You can use a Cloud Storage Pool to tier the objects to lower-cost storage and to free up space in StorageGRID.

To implement a tiering solution:

  1. Create a single Cloud Storage Pool.

  2. Configure an ILM rule that moves rarely used objects from Storage Nodes to the Cloud Storage Pool.

  3. Add the rule to your ILM policy. Then, simulate and activate the policy.

Maintain multiple cloud endpoints

You can configure multiple Cloud Storage Pools if you want to tier or back up object data to more than one cloud. The filters in your ILM rules let you specify which objects are stored in each Cloud Storage Pool. For example, you might want to store objects from some tenants or buckets in Amazon S3 Glacier and objects from other tenant or buckets in Azure Blob storage. Or, you might want to move data between Amazon S3 Glacier and Azure Blob storage. When using multiple Cloud Storage Pools, keep in mind that an object can be stored in only one Cloud Storage Pool at a time.

To implement multiple cloud endpoints:

  1. Create up to 10 Cloud Storage Pools.

  2. Configure ILM rules to store the appropriate object data at the appropriate time in each Cloud Storage Pool. For example, store objects from bucket A in Cloud Storage Pool A, and store objects from bucket B in Cloud Storage Pool B. Or, store objects in Cloud Storage Pool A for some amount of time and then move them to Cloud Storage Pool B.

  3. Add the rules to your ILM policy. Then, simulate and activate the policy.