QoreStor's cloud tier feature enables QoreStor data to be quickly and easily accelerated to the cloud tier. Using your existing data management applications (DMAs) and any supported protocol, files can be written to a QoreStor container and replicated to your cloud tier according to easily defined policies.

QoreStor provides a policy engine that allows you to set idle time and on-premises retention criteria to be used in identifying which files are most suited for replication to the cloud. Policies are defined at the container level and apply to all files within that container. Using the QoreStor Cloud Policy, you can replicate files based on:

• Idle time - replicate stable files idle for more than the selected number of hours.
• File extensions - replicate files that match or do not match names in a list of extensions.
• Regular expressions - include or exclude files based on their match to configured regular expressions.
• File locations - replicated files in a list of directories, or all files except those in a list of directories.

In addition, there is an On-Prem Retention Age policy that allows you to specify how long a copy of a file is kept after it has been replicated to the cloud tier. Once a file has been replicated, the file on the QoreStor server becomes a stub, meaning it exists in the namespace but the data exists only in the cloud tier.  Once a file has been stubbed and moved to the cloud tier, that file can no longer be edited.

With these policy options, you are able to configure cloud tier replication to meet one of three use cases:

• Data replication - this creates a direct copy of the backup data stored in QoreStor on the cloud tier.
• Extended hold - this offloads older and less frequently accessed data to the cloud tier for long-term archiving.
• Replicate and extend - this provides both a direct replica and a long-term archive.

Caution: When storing backups of a server using continuous data protection (CDP), if you delete a cloud tier that contains CDP backups, the backups that are older than the on-prem retention age become unrecoverable. A segment file may be present for these backups, but the associated files may be stubbed and become unlinked during cloud tier deletion, which prevents you from restoring the backup.

Any data that is transferred from the QoreStor instance by the cloud tier is encrypted with zero knowledge encryption. The encryption keys are solely owned by you. If the encryption keys are placed in the cloud tier, a passphrase is used to encrypt those keys and that passphrase is only known to you. For added security, QoreStor obfuscates metadata and data store objects that are stored in the cloud tier.

Starting with QoreStor release 7.2.1, up to two Cloud Tiers can be configured in an instance of QoreStor. You may use storage from different cloud vendors. Each QoreStor container can be mapped to only one Cloud Tier. Both Cloud Tiers can be active simultaneously and used for replicating data from a different container to cloud storage.

For copying or migrating data from one Cloud Tier to another, please contact Quest Support for information on a suitable method for your environment.

QoreStor 7.3.0 allows data tiered out to cloud providers to be locked in the cloud storage, which provides immutability in the cloud.

If AWS is the chosen cloud provider, then enabling intelligent tiering would directly store the objects in AWS Intelligent Tiering Storage Class thereby reducing the costs associated with AWS.

For more information about working with cloud tiers, see Cloud tiering.