Configuring the archive zone

Archive object data residing on IBM Storage Ceph using the Object Storage Archive Zone Feature.

Before you begin

A running IBM Storage Ceph cluster.
Root-level access to a Ceph Monitor node.
Ceph Object Gateway software is installed.

About this task

Note: Ensure you have a realm before configuring a zone as an archive. Without a realm, you cannot archive data through an archive zone for default zone/zonegroups.

The archive zone uses multi-site replication and S3 object versioning feature in Ceph Object Gateway. The archive zone retains all version of all the objects available, even when deleted in the production file.

The archive zone has a history of versions of S3 objects that can be eliminated only through the gateways that are associated with the archive zone. It captures all the data updates and metadata to consolidate them as versions of S3 objects. Bucket granular replication to the archive zone can be used after creating an archive zone.

You can control the storage space usage of an archive zone through the bucket Lifecycle policies, where you can define the number of versions you would like to keep for an object.

An archive zone helps protect your data against logical or physical errors. It can save users from logical failures, such as accidentally deleting a bucket in the production zone. It can also save your data from massive hardware failures, like a complete production site failure. Additionally, it provides an immutable copy, which can help build a ransomware protection strategy.

To implement the bucket granular replication, use the sync policies commands for enabling and disabling policies. For more information, see Creating a sync policy group and Modifying a sync policy group.

Note: Using the sync policy group procedures is optional and only necessary to use enabling and disabling with bucket granular replication. For using the archive zone without bucket granular replication, it is not necessary to use the sync policy procedures.

If you want to migrate the storage cluster from single site, see Migrating a single site system to multi-site.

Procedure

During new zone creation, use the archive tier to configure the archive zone.

radosgw-admin zone create --rgw-zonegroup={ZONE_GROUP_NAME} --rgw-zone={ZONE_NAME} --endpoints={http://FQDN:PORT},{http://FQDN:PORT} --tier-type=archive

For example,

[ceph: root@host01 /]# radosgw-admin zone create --rgw-zonegroup=us --rgw-zone=us-east --endpoints={http://example.com:8080} --tier-type=archive

From the archive zone, modify the archive zone to sync from only the primary zone and perform a period update commit.
```
$ radosgw-admin zone modify --rgw-zone archive --sync_from primary --sync_from_all false --sync-from-rm secondary

$ radosgw-admin period update --commit
```
Note: The recommendation is to reduce the max_objs_per_shard to 50K to account for the omap olh entries in the archive zone. This helps in keeping the number of omap entries per bucket index shard object in check to prevent large omap warnings. For example,
```
ceph config set client.rgw rgw_max_objs_per_shard 50000
```