QoreStor 6.1.0 - User Guide

Cloud Tiering

QoreStor's cloud tiering 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 tieraccording 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.

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 names such as blockmap and data store objects that are stored in the cloud tier.

Disaster Recovery from the cloud

When configured with a Cloud Tier, QoreStor provides the ability to capture QoreStor configuration information as well as storage group and container data. With this information, it is possible to re-create a lost or failed QoreStor server using the data in the cloud.

The disaster recovery process utilizes the QoreStor DRSNAP file, which is a disaster recovery reference file stored in the cloud and encrypted with the same passphrase used to encrypt the encryption keys for the cloud tier. The DRSNAP file is created when a cloud tier is created, and is updated each time a container is created or when the cloud tier passphrase is changed. The DRSNAP file contains:

• Configuration information (storage groups, containers, connections and VTL data).
• Cloud Tier and cloud containers for the source containers.
• Name space for the source containers and the cloud containers.
• Cloud container blockmaps.
• Source containers files are stubs and point to corresponding Cloud container blockmaps.
• Datastore headers for Cloud Tier.
• Dictionary for the Cloud Tier is repopulated.

In the event of QoreStor server failure, a recovery can be initiated on a new, licensed QoreStor server to restore the previous configuration. At a high-level, a recovery will go through the following steps:

• Connect to your cloud provider with configured credentials and passphrase

  IMPORTANT: The required passphrase is the passphrase used when created the cloud tier. Without the cloud tier passphrase, recovery is impossible.

• Restore the archived DRSNAP file to the new QoreStor server and decrypt the file.
• Parse the DRSNAP file for cloud-replicated containers as well as other storage groups and containers.
• Rebuilds the cloud tier using information collected.

Refer to Performing a recovery from the cloud for more information.

Supported file system protocols

CIFS