Unity with CTA (Cloud Tiering Appliance)

[stevekarra]

I need to understand how Veeam can backup a Dell EMC Unity array which has files that have been stubbed out to the cloud via their Cloud Tiering Appliance.

If you have any pointers to WPs or documentation that outlines how this works, particularly how it handles the stubs, I would appreciate it.

Thanks.

[ronnmartin61]

We don't have any native integration with the NAS side of Unity so we're not "stub-aware" per se. Per the CTA documentation and an informal discussion with one of my Dell counterparts the only slightly negative side effect for our NAS backup and Unity w/CTA would be that files would be backed up again as they tier out to object storage since the new stub creation would have changed file attributes triggering the backup. Similarly if the stub was rehydrated the updated file attributes would trigger a backup. Not the ideal behavior but it doesn't seem to present any fundamental incompatibility. Please let us know if you find anything different in your testing.

[stevekarra]

Thank you. That seems to be my understanding. Sometimes you want to (infrequently) backup the archive anyway so it's understandable.

I suspect NDMP would be able to capture just the resident data on the array, so that could be the only option to avoid backing up archive data repeatedly.