Recovery-As-A-Service (Raas); Retention And Archiving - Dell PowerVault DL4000 User Manual

Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS)

Managed service providers (MSPs) can fully leverage AppAssure 5 as a platform for delivering recovery as a service
(RaaS). RaaS facilitates complete recovery-in-the-cloud by replicating customers' physical and virtual servers along
with their data to the service provider's cloud as virtual machines to support recovery testing or actual recovery
operations. Customers wanting to perform recovery-in-the-cloud can configure replication on their protected machines
on the local cores to an AppAssure service provider. In the event of a disaster, the MSPs can instantly spin-up virtual
machines for the customer.
MSPs can deploy multi-tenant AppAssure 5-based RaaS infrastructure that can host multiple and discrete organizations
or business units (the tenants) that ordinarily do not share security or data on a single server or a group of servers. The
data of each tenant is isolated and secure from other tenants and the service provider.

Retention And Archiving

In AppAssure 5, backup and retention policies are flexible and, therefore, easily configurable. The ability to tailor
retention polices to the needs of an organization not only aids in helping to meet compliance requirements, but does so
without compromising on RTO.
Retention policies enforce the periods of time in which backups are stored on short-term (fast and expensive) media.
Sometimes certain business and technical requirements mandate extended retention of these backups, but use of fast
storage is cost prohibitive. Therefore, this requirement creates a need for long-term (slow and cheap) storage.
Businesses often use long-term storage for archiving both compliance and non-compliance data. The archive feature
supports extended retentions for compliance and non-compliance data, as well as being used for seeding replication
data to a target core.
Figure 6. Custom Retention Policy
In AppAssure 5 retention policies can be customized to specify the length of time a backup recovery point is maintained.
As the age of the recovery points approach the end of their retention period, they 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 growing rapidly. AppAssure 5 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 and 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.
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