Switching Azure repo from Cool to Hot

[dtwiley]

We've been experimenting and found that using Cool for backups with nightly copies to Azure is costing more for write operations than it is for data storage.

I can see that we can change the option on the repo "Use cool blob storage tier" to disabled for repos which already have data in them.

I'm assuming that this just means any NEW data which is written will be written as hot instead of cool and wont break anything?
ie. as this is object storage we'll just end up with vbks and vibs being made of a combination of hot and cool tier blocks depending on whether they were written before or after the setting change?

[veremin]

You've understood it correctly: you can switch between hot and cold access tiers at any time without encountering any issues. When you switch, new data will be written to the hot access tier, while the previous one will remain in the cold access tier.

Thanks!

[dtwiley]

Thanks, is there no way of writing as hot to reduce ingress costs and then switching it to cool once its written to then save long term storage costs?

[veremin]

No, we do not support Azure data lifecycle management policies. However, it is possible to transfer long-term GFS restore points to Azure Archive Tier. Thanks!

[dtwiley]

BTW, we switched a repo from cool to hot and we're still being billed for cool write operations. It's unlikely this is an Azure/billing issue, so before I escalate to MS, can you confirm this scenario is actually supposed to work? It feels like the product has ignored the setting change and is still writing as cool, is there a away we can check what the most recent blocks were written as?

[veremin]

Confirmed, this scenario should work as intended.

You can validate it by opening the Azure Portal or Azure Storage Explorer, navigating to the repository virtual folder, and checking the access tier of the recent objects.

It is worth noting that you may be billed at higher rates as the majority of the backup data is still stored in cold storage. Remember that only the new data is written with the hot access tier.

Thanks!

[ericschott_OF]

If you did not force an active full in some form, then you may have backup chains that span cool and hot. If you have immutability on, you may be extending the cool data immutability and this could get you cool api put calls.

not sure if this is your scenario, but something to watch...

[dtwiley]

If we are extending immutability of existing cool blocks that makes sense but every environment has change, so i'm not sure why we're not seeing new blocks being written as hot with the associated charges.

Surely a chain which spans cool and hot will have some cool charges AND some hot charges.

[dtwiley]

Actually, does Veeam explicitly set the access tier to Hot or just leave it to be inferred by the storage account settings when the repo is set NOT to use Cool? Our storage account is still set to Cool, so if Veeam is not setting Hot then this is why everything is still Cool.