Snapcenter and capacity Tier

Steve_A — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 09:42:42 GMT

I wasn't sure which forum to use and might be in the wrong place. We are using ontap in AWS and are looking into snapcenter to protect SQL data. The SQL load is somewhat of a data warehouse where DB's are very busy for a few weeks and then taper off after 4-8 weeks but still need to be available. We are tiering older data to capacity tier at 8 weeks and able to deal with either slow processing or an extra procedure to bring it back to SSD in the one off conditions when we need the data. We are backing up with other method right now and there are no NetApp snapshots or backups.

I wanted to ask how SnapCenter works in conjunction with the capacity tier and SQL backups.

This helped:

Snapshot-Only
- Cold snapshot blocks in the volume that are not shared with the active file system are moved to the cloud tier. Assuming that the aggregate is more than 50% utilized, it takes approximately 2 days for inactive snapshot blocks to become cold. The Snapshot-Only cooling period is adjustable from 2 to 63 days by using the tiering-minimum-cooling-days setting.
- When cold blocks in a volume with a tiering policy set to Snapshot-Only are read, they are made hot and written to the performance tier.

So if I understand the tiering All option moves everything to capacity tier which we don't want (I think this is just an AWS FSx option). It seems if you choose Snapshot-Only you lose the ability to tier other data on the volume that is not part of the DB snapshots. This is ok, but I am just trying to understand how all of this works.

topic Snapcenter and capacity Tier in Data Protection

Snapcenter and capacity Tier