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How does AltaVault work with Amazon Glacier FAQ

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Applies to

  • AltaVault
  • AVA400
  • AVA800
  • AVA-v

Answer

  • What are the advantages of Amazon Glacier over Amazon S3?
    • The biggest benefit is the reduction in per GB storage cost over Amazon S3.
       
  • What are the disadvantages of Amazon Glacier over Amazon S3?
    • After data has been written to Amazon Glacier it is stored in the S3 cloud for a period of 24 hours before it is moved to Amazon Glacier. After the data has been moved to Glacier there is a delay of 5 hours before being able to retrieve your data, unless an Expedited retrieval method is specified. In addition to this data restore costs from Glacier are higher than S3. These costs should be fully understood before moving to Amazon Glacier.
       
  • Restoring objects from Amazon Glacier.
  • Full details can be found from the Amazon Glacier FAQ.
    • Before an object in Glacier can be downloaded it first needs to be restored.  Amazon charges for these restore operations by the MB.
    • AWS allows customers to retrieve 10GB for free.
    • There are three levels of priority for restore operations with different costs.  By default AltaVault uses the Standard retrieval method but customers can create prepopulation jobs using the command line interface to use any of the three.
    • The Expedited retrieval method may not be available if the AWS activity is high and the resources to perform the operation are not available.
       
  • How does AltaVault help to reduce retrieval costs of Amazon Glacier?
    • The local cache of data in the AltaVault datastore can help avoid the retrieval of data from Glacier.
    • A larger Altavault appliance with a bigger local disk cache might be considered for new deployments. This would mean that more data can be locally cached in the datastore before being evicted.
    • Deduplication against the cloud data is disabled by default.  Some backup applications will write a file then read it back to verify the integrity of the written copy.  If the file was deduplicated against data in the cloud, this data would need to be downloaded to satisfy the read requests.  In the case of Glacier, these verify tasks would fail because the cloud data is not immediately available.  This default behavior can be overridden, however it should be fully understood before doing so.
       
  • Does the AltaVault support cloud agility migrations to Amazon Glacier?
    • Migrations to Glacier are supported.
    • Migrations from Glacier to another cloud provider or bucket type are not supported.

Additional Information

 

 

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