SimpliVity Backup Strategy?

[BoonHong]

Question:

1. Can I set hourly backup to occur only during office hours?

2. Is it possible to set expiration by number of recovery points instead of by time alone? For example, after the last hourly backup of the day, instead of setting expiring time of 3 hours, I want to keep it until the next hourly backup occurred.

3. Since SimpliVity offsite backup is far more efficiency, but I also want extra backup to be kept outside of SimpliVity platform for extra protection. But instead of using 3rd party backup such as Nakivo to backup from offsite SimpliVity node, is it possible to map the SimpliVity offsite backup into vCenter for Nakivo to back it up locally? 

Below is my SimpliVity backup schedule:

1. Hourly backup from every weekdays from 10am to 6pm, expiring 3 hours later so that 2 latest backups is retained.

2. Daily backup (except Sunday) at 7pm to take over the hourly backup to keep for 1 week.

3. Daily offsite backup at 1am 

4. Weekly backup on Sunday at 12am to keep for 4 weeks

5. Monthly backup on last day of the month at 12:30am to keep for 3 months.

Any suggestion to improve this?

[gustenar]

Hello BoonHong,

Thank you for using HPE Simplivity Forum. To try to answer your questions:

1. Yes, you can modify the Server Start/Stop Time for this and set it to office hours. 

2. Expiration time is set as a numeric value (minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years) only, no other configuration available here. 

3. I don't think this is possible because of the way the backups are stored on Simplivity. It might be best to backup the full VMs using your third party software for extra protection. Simplivity also supports backing up to an HPE StoreOnce device.

Please check the Simplivity Administration Guide for further recommendations and guidelines related to backups (page 97):

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docLocale=en_US&docId=a00099035en_us 

Thanks

[BoonHong]

3. Beside a proprietary solution such as HPE StoreOnce device, I hopes SimpliVity can also backup to other standard devices such as the more affordable QNAP or Synology NAS etc.

One of the other main reasons why we pick SimpliVity over other competitors isn't just because of it's superior storage performance, but it doesn't lock compute only to SimpliVity nodes. If SimpliVity can backup to non-HPE devices too, it will be another selling point.

Our largest VM (email server) is almost 4TB in size and offsite backup takes days. Fortunately we have two SimpliVity federations and offsite backup to one another takes just few hours. Since you mentioned that it is not possible to map the SimpliVity offsite backup into vCenter for Nakivo to back it up locally (most SAN storage support this function), can we at least restore the backup as a "alias VM" such that it won't consume additional storage for our backup solution (Nakivo) to back it up manually, and have this VM deleted after the manual backup is done?

[gustenar]

You can create a new VM when restoring from backup or replace an existing one. This restored VM will have the same characteristics of any other VM. The restored VM will be placed in a Simplivity datastore. 

[BoonHong]

My main concern is after restoring a 4TB VM, even with SimpliVity dedup and compression, how much additional storage will it consume even if I do not power it up?

[gustenar]

It won't be a big change because all the data is already there and it won't get duplicated when you restore the VM. 

[BinodHP]

Dear community members,

We are setting up the new simplivity nodes...thinking of this

Any suggestion please. Many thanks in advance.