IBM Cloud Object Storage as a capacity tier

In Jordan’s blog on Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4 you would have seen that Veeam is now natively integrated with IBM Cloud Object Storage (ICOS). This offers new data management capabilities to automate the movement of virtual machine backups to lower-cost, long-term storage as they age out of the required operational restore window.

ICOS provides a capacity tier to a Veeam scale-out backup repository, allowing the offloading of older backup files into the cheaper storage from the performance tier. This reduces long-term retention costs and makes the scale-out backup repository capacity virtually infinite, simplifying storage management. The most recent backups (say, last 7-14 days) remain on the performance tier for fast restores. There is an option to specify “how many days” before backups are sent to the capacity tier.

ICOS storage class tiers and resiliency options

ICOS offers the following storage class tiers:

• Standard tier for data with active workloads

• Vault for less-active workloads

• Cold Vault for cold workloads

• Flex for dynamic workloads

• Archive for long-term retention

You will need to understand how often you will access ICOS to restore the backup and select the correct option. Next, select the appropriate resiliency option: Cross Region, Regional, or single data center.

ICOS and Veeam setup

To order IBM Cloud Object Storage, follow these instructions and create the Service Credentials, ensuring you use the HMAC option. Collect the following information for use in the setup of the capacity tier:

• Service point

• Region

• Credentials:

  • Access key

  • Secret key

Next, in the Veeam console, all you need to do is to create a Scale-Out Repository with an existing or new Backup Repository created as an Extent. Finally, add the ICOS repository as the Capacity Tier, using the information collected above. To maintain your backups see the information at Managing Capacity Tier Data.

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