How to Backup NetApp StorageGRID [Research]

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If you need multiple copies of your data, you use ILM (Infrastructure Lifecycle Management) policies to do that (or versioning if you want to keep multiple versions). But what if you need to backup the whole grid?

Backup of the whole grid would be backup of the buckets. The buckets are where the important user data (objects) reside.

1 grid with 2 sites is not a DR or backup solution.

NetApp StorageGRID Backup Options to Research

  1. NetApp ONTAP FabricPool Mirror
    • Learn about ONTAP FabricPool mirrors
    • Note: This is for mirroring the object-store part of the aggregate to another bucket. This is mainly used with MetroCluster (where we have mirrored aggregates), not typically for non-MetroCluster ONTAP.
  2. NetApp CloudSync
    • Cloud Sync overview
    • Note: The documentation for this is quite old (like 2020). Cloud Manager (of which Cloud Sync was a feature) became BlueXP. When I look in the latest BlueXP documentation, I do not see backup of StorageGRID to StorageGRID listed.
  3. NetApp CloudMirror:
  4. NetApp Cross-Grid Replication (CGR):
For Application Data

The main options are CloudMirror and CGR:

Or application implemented (like FabricPool supports FabricPool Mirror.)

Other Notes (caveat: check if still up to date*)
  • CGR has the requirement "Must have S3 Object Lock disabled"*
  • CGR can only be enabled on a tenant during creation, so existing tenants with objects cannot have it enabled.
    • In 11.9 CGR can be enabled on existing buckets.
  • Both the source and destination buckets must be empty to enable CGR, so existing buckets with objects cannot have it enabled
  • CloudSync can only copy what it sees (no concern if you just want to copy the latest version.)
  • CGR allows the version order to be maintained across both grids (external utilities generally do not, so those have to list objects in order to compare what's new/updated.)
  • Bucket Mirroring (?) has a limit of 100 tenants or buckets (soft limit). Would need to be configured per bucket and per tenant.
  • 3rd party tool - like rclone - would require scripting and running on a client.
  • Client or Application - could be an option if the application allows for sync writes to two buckets, but most applications don't implement this.
  • ILM has no impact on CGR.
  • CGR has a limit of 5000 versions per object.
  • CloudMirror replicates tags when the bucket is not versioned, but not if it is versioned.
  • Cannot cascade, fan-out, or fan-in CGR.
  • CyberVault?

Other Links


Lab On Demand

Object Version Deletes with CGR

[Image from 11.7 documentation] Object versions are not deleted at the destination, but if you had a backup policy of say 30 days, and the version is older than 30 days, that could trigger a delete.


StorageGRID Technical Reports

StorageGRID Enable site

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