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DL4300 Appliance
Virtualization and cloud
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Figure 7. Custom retention policy
In your appliance, retention policies can be customized to specify the length of time a backup recovery point is
maintained. As the age of the recovery points approaches the end of their retention period, the recovery points
age out and are removed from the retention pool. Typically, this process becomes inefficient and eventually
fails as the amount of data and the period of retention start grows rapidly. Your appliance solves the big data
problem by managing the retention of large amounts of data with complex retention policies and performing rollup
operations for aging data using efficient metadata operations.
Backups can be performed with an interval of a few minutes. As these backups age over days, months, and
years, retention policies manage the aging and deletion of old backups. A simple waterfall method defines the
aging process. The levels within the waterfall are defined in minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years. The
retention policy is enforced by the nightly rollup process.
For long-term archiving, your appliance provides the ability to create an archive of the source or target core on
any removable media. The archive is internally optimized and all data in the archive is compressed, encrypted,
and deduplicated. If the total size of the archive is larger than the space available on the removable media, the
archive spans across multiple devices based on the available space on the media. The archive also can be locked
with a passphrase. Recovery from an archive does not require a new core; any core can ingest the archive and
recover data if the administrator has the passphrase and the encryption keys.
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Virtualization and cloud
The Core is cloud-ready, which allows you to leverage the compute capacity of the cloud for recovery.
Your appliance can export any protected or replicated machine to a virtual machine, such as licensed versions
of VMware or Hyper-V. You can perform a one-time virtual export, or you can establish a virtual standby VM by
establishing a continuous virtual export. With continuous exports, the virtual machine is incrementally updated
after every snapshot. The incremental updates are very fast and provide standby clones that are ready to be
powered up with a click of a button. The supported virtual machine export types are VMware Workstation/Server
on a folder; direct export to a vSphere/VMware ESX(i) host; export to Oracle VirtualBox; and export to Microsoft
Hyper-V Server on Windows Server 2008 (x64), 2008 R2, 2012 (x64), and 2012 R2 (including support for Hyper-V
generation 2 VMs)
Additionally, you can now archive your repository data to the cloud using Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3,
Rackspace Cloud Block Storage, or other OpenStack-based cloud services.
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