Various organizations tend to retain their application data for several years due to regulatory and compliance reasons that leads to the growth of active and archived data at faster rates consuming large storage capacities. To solve this problem, backup data from enterprise storage systems such as PowerFlex can be offloaded to backup appliances inside the data center or a public Cloud Tier for safekeeping.

Dell Data Domain (DD) Cloud Tier provides such a solution for applications running on PowerFlex.

Dell Data Domain Cloud Tier feature enables the movement of data residing in active storage tiers for cost effective and large capacity object storage to the public, private, and hybrid cloud for long-term retention. The DD system sends only compressed, unique, and deduplicated data to the cloud. This ensures that the data sent to the cloud occupies less capacity and is efficient for data transfers over public or private networks. Data Domain Virtual Edition (DDVE) is a deployment option of DD that is based on a physical appliance running on a VMware environment that allows a software-only solution for PowerFlex with DD Cloud Tier.

This paper describes how to configure a Cloud Tier with generic applications and an Oracle database running on an on-premises PowerFlex environment using DDVE. The paper also provides design considerations for common tasks such as backup to active tier, data movement to Cloud Tier, data recall from Cloud Tier, and restore the backup steps for the following use cases:

• Generic applications files using PowerFlex volumes for data to be backed up to Cloud Tier using BoostFS.
• Oracle database using PowerFlex volumes for data to be backed up to Cloud Tier using Oracle RMAN agent.