Inquiry on Azure Blob Tiering Strategy (Hot to Archive) in Veeam SOBR Environment

[dulgidulgi]

Hello,

The customer has been using a SOBR configuration for an extended period of time, storing backup data in the Hot tier of Azure Blob storage. For more than three years, all data has been consistently stored in the Hot tier due to internal policy, which cannot be changed.

Recently, there has been a need to optimize costs, and discussions have begun around reducing expenses by transitioning existing data in the Hot tier to a lower-cost tier, such as Archive.

As I do not have prior experience with this type of operation, I would like to ask if you have any experience or recommendations regarding this approach.

From my understanding, one possible approach would be to add a Cold/Archive tier Azure Blob storage account and then enable and extend the Archive Tier within the existing SOBR configuration to migrate data accordingly. However, based on the Archive tier limitations, it appears that standard Veeam backup data (Full and Incremental chains) cannot be directly moved to the Archive tier.

Given this limitation, it seems that the only practical option I can currently suggest to the customer is to transition existing Hot tier data to the Cool tier instead.

Could you please confirm if this understanding is correct? Additionally, if there are better approaches or if my current assumption is incorrect, I would greatly appreciate your guidance and recommendations.

Thank you in advance for your support.

Best regards,

[Brad.Barker]

Hello! I can confirm that the Archive Tier of a Scale Out Backup Repository only supports Cold Storage options (such as Azure Archive and Deep Archive) and Veeam can only send GFS related full backups to this tier for image backups. If the backups in question are only daily image backups, they would not be eligible for offload to the Archive tier. Based on your post, if storage cost reduction is the end goal, then usage of cool storage of hot storage might be best approach, but from previous experience, this can be dependent on how long the data is kept as cool storage is often cheaper for capacity but more expensive for API operations, and the chain length can change the weight on API costs vs Storage costs. Veeam suggests in our documentation, that data should be kept for a minimum of 30 days will little access of that data for the Cool tier to be beneficial: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbr/u ... r-settings

[dulgidulgi]

The customer’s current scenario is to retain backup data in Azure for 9,999 days. Both full and incremental backups are stored in Azure.

However, according to the information in the link you provided, it seems that when using Cool Blob storage, costs may actually increase if the retention period is set for a long duration.

In this case, would it be more appropriate to keep the data in Hot tier instead?

[Brad.Barker]

There are factors that could lead to that, such as frequent/continuous job runs. Effectively, anything that could lead to higher levels of regular API operations can lead cool blob storage costs to increase as the cost of cool tier is weighted more towards API usage over storage. The main note I wanted you to see from the link was the Specifying Azure Access Tier settings that notes the behavior around frequent/continuously running jobs that can cause higher API usage.

With no GFS in play for this scenario, and is a daily and weekly backup for 9999 days, Archive Tier won't be an option as mentioned. So you'll need to focus on Hot of Cool tier storage classes, or discuss changing retention design to leverage GFS Retention for those longer term restore points if viable (though that may not be an option depending on the requirements).