NetApp ONTAP S3 with immutability

[michele.berardo]

Hi all,
we are using a NetApp ONTAP 9.14.1P10 S3 with immutability on Veeam Cloud Connect environment as Backup Repository Performance Tier.
We have a Scale-Out Repository with 6 S3 buckets.
Object Lock enabled on storage side without retention. All the buckets have the same 7 days immutability retention.
At this moment the tenant using this as target repository for Backup Copy Jobs, has a retention of 7 daily + 1 GFS weekly.

Honestly we are experiencing strange behavior about usage space.
This tenant is using more/less 100TB of its quota, looking into backup copy chains, we can consider about 70TB of first full + some incremental. On storage perspective, we are using 216TB this is 3 times the original size of the full and this is not acceptable, for us, but I think for every SP worldwide, because tenant doesn't have this information and we, as SP, are paying space for that.

Block Generation is surely involved, but we expect to have a lot storage saving with "block cloning" technology. Block Generation should be 10 days (for S3 repository) + 7 days for immutability + 7 days for BCJ retention, so the worst case should be 24 days. Unfortunately this seems to be not visible on "Veeam side" so it's quite difficult to check if everything is working as expected.

Last but not least, ONTAP at this moment doesn't have SOSAPI integration, so our buckets usage are totally random, so we have 1-2 buckets full growing continuously and the others under used....I think this is the result of not having "free space and capacity" information on Veeam side. I hope this will be fixed asap.

Someone is using similar technology and has an idea of what is happening and how to manage this?

Case # 07642088 opened and escalated for further investigations.

Cheers.

[ybarrap2003]

@michele.berardo NetApp ONTAP S3 with immutability is not supported with Veeam. We are currently working with them to resolve issues.

We only have support for the non immutable option see below:

https://www.veeam.com/sys539

[rennerstefan]

Regarding SOSAPI I would also recommend you to open a case with your NetApp contacts as they would need to implement it on their side.
As Pete said we are actively talking to the NetApp ONTAP PM team but it is always good to make them aware of the customer need from the NetApp Sales side as well.
Thanks

[michele.berardo]

Hi all,
this is a very bad news. Now we need to think about moving all the data out of this Scale-Out Repository, and this won't be easy, we don't have infinite space.
Just to understand better:
1. When do you think the fix could be available? 1-2-6 months? just to understand if it could be better to wait for it, or moving faster away from that
2. When the fix will be available, do you think we need to reconfigure everything from scratch? or the actual issues will be managed automatically by the fix?
3. What kind of issues have you found? similar to what have I described?

[ybarrap2003]

Hi @michele.berardo see responses below.

1. When do you think the fix could be available? 1-2-6 months? just to understand if it could be better to wait for it, or moving faster away from that - I suggest you open up a trouble ticket with NetApp. This way there will be aware of your issue. Also, as @rennerstefan mentioned. Contact your NetApp sales team to help you with escalating your issue,
2. When the fix will be available, do you think we need to reconfigure everything from scratch? or the actual issues will be managed automatically by the fix? This will be determined by what NetApp recommends. It could be a P update or it could be pushed to the next release i.e. ONTAP 9.17.1.
3. What kind of issues have you found? similar to what have I described? Since each S3 vendor customizes their S3 implementation. This situation might be unique to NetApp ONTAP S3.

[michele.berardo]

Thank you for your precious information. Do you have some reference about this investigation on NetApp side? starting from L1 would be a huge work....

[ybarrap2003]

Hi @michele.berardo this is internal to NetApp. I would suggest you contact your NetApp partner manager who can engage the NetApp DP specialist for your region. They are well aware of this ongoing issue.