This solution architecture shows the integration of Cloud Tier with DDVE running on-premises using the PowerFlex HCI system with VMware vSphere hypervisor to send deduplicated long-term backup retention data to an Amazon S3 object storage target.

The following figure shows a logical view of the DD Cloud Tier setup on the PowerFlex HCI system with VMware vSphere hypervisor.

Figure 2.        PowerFlex with DD Cloud Tier architecture

This solution demonstrates Cloud Tier integration facilitated through Data Domain Virtual Edition (DDVE) running on the PowerFlex HCI system. The PowerFlex HCI with VMware vSphere hypervisor is deployed using four Dell PowerEdge R640 servers. A storage virtual machine (SVM) runs on each ESXi host. PowerFlex MDM and SDS components are installed on each dedicated SVM. The device management is performed using the SVM that yields the best I/O performance. A single PowerFlex protection domain is created from the four SDSs, from which two storage pools are created using the SSD drives attached to the PowerFlex HCI nodes. Two storage pools are required to separate the backup data from the application data. The PowerFlex SDCs are installed directly into the ESXi hosts. PowerFlex storage volumes are created from the storage pools and then mapped to the ESXi hosts and formatted as vSphere Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) datastores.

DDVE version 7.7 is installed into the PowerFlex HCI system and configured with four vCPUs and 32 GB of memory to support 16 TB of backup storage capacity. The virtual disks for the Data Domain active tier use volumes presented from the PowerFlex system to store backup data and metadata. It is recommended to start with a 1 TB volume for metadata storage and expand in 1 TB increments. The capacity of the user data disks is based on the DDVE license and the maximum virtual disk size that is supported by the VMware hypervisor. The Data Domain Cloud Tier is integrated with Amazon S3 using SSH keys for long-term retention of backup files.