veeam in combination with DD Cloud Tier

[RobS]

We are looking to offload our long term retention (Backup copy job) to the cloud.
we are investigating DD cloud tier because we are already using DD as target repository.

now we are look for a mechanism in veeam that can retrieve data out of the DD cloud tier without getting timed out when you want to do restores or other actions in veeam that need old data (data in the Cloud)

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This information is from veeam after creating a veeam case:

From what I understand, files on DD storage are physically moved to another storage and Veeam will not be able to trace them. So before restores you will need to move the files back to local repository. However depending on the particular file, Veeam can require a certain file during backup as well (for example, during retention or GFS point generation). So if a file is missing those operations will fail as well.

You can query what files are in the backup chain using powershell like:

Add-PSSnapin VeeamPSSnapin
$job = get-vbrbackup -name "backup job"
$job.getvmstorages() | select filepath

You can also go to backup set properties (https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... tml?ver=95) and see which files are grey. It will be necessary to migrate the files back to DataDomain and rescan it to make them available again.
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[foggy]

Hi Rob, currently there's no close integration between Veeam B&R and DD Cloud Tier.

[sunman123]

Hi foggy, have there been any updates to Veeam regarding integration between Veeam B&R and Data Domain Cloud Tier? Or, will we still need to control all data movement to/from cloud on the Data Domain manually?

[Andreas Neufert]

From our documentation:

Object storage gateway appliances that are used to store backup data in filer (CIFS/NFS) or block device mode (iSCSI/FC/SAS) are not supported if the backup data is offloaded to object storage and is no longer stored directly on the appliance.
Such gateway appliances are only supported in the following cases:

• All of the backup data is stored on the appliance altogether (that is, all of the backup chains are stored on the appliance as a whole and not scattered across multiple devices) and only additional copies of the backup data are transported to object storage.

• These appliances emulate a tape system (VTL) as an access protocol for Veeam Backup & Replication.

As we work with the data over time and scan backup chains and metadata for integrity we do not support offloading of data to other storage with media breaks or higher latency than usual internal storage latency. Basically Veeam is not aware that the data is moved and so we fail with the above timeout.
This solution is currently completely unsupported and there is no plan for now to support the specific DD feature.

However, you can add the DD in a Scale Out Backup Repository and leverage the Cloud Tier functionality to offload the data. This process is incremental forever and is optimized to avoid egress charges and optimize space saving on the object storage. It is way more efficient than the datadomain approach with Veeam (as we do not know the data is offloaded and we work with the data => high egress cost).