Cloud Sync Questions

[dcornely]

Hi,

I just discovered Cloud Sync and it's an interesting service.  I have a few questions about what it can do and what may be coming (or viewed as a feature request):

1. Is it limited to NetApp NFS or can this be used with any NFS server?  It appears to be vendor agnostic but would appreciate confirmation.
2. I see archival as a good use case for this as well, where I could sync an NFS share's old data to S3 and then delete the data from my on premises NFS freeing it up for more productive work.  However, I would need the ability to pull this data out of S3 and sync it back to the same or a different NFS server target.  The solution brief states "...you then move the results back to your original location..." implying I cannot use a new location.  Can someone please confirm if I can utilize a different NFS server target and if not, is this capability coming?
3. In what state do the files exist in S3?  Specifically, can I access the files natively in S3 (e.g, via Cyberduck, browser, etc.) or does Cloud Sync chunk them up or lay them down in some sort of proprietary format that requires Cloud Sync for retrieval?

Thanks!

-Dave

[yaronh]

Hello Dave,

Nice to hear from you again (Remember you from the old WFA days :-))

1) It is indeed agnostic and should work on any NFS source, in any location (On-premise or cloud-based).

2) Cloud Sync works on relationships (Though not SnapMirror one). You set your source NFS (Full volume or sub-folder) and target a bucket
(Or a folder within). Returning the data from S3 is another relationship, where you select the source bucket (Or folder) and target an NFS export

(Or folder).

So yes, You can definitely return the data not to the original location.

With that said - Cloud Sync currently sync your data. If you add a file it would be synced on next schedule. Same for modify. If you delete,
we delete. We are adding a feature to allow NOT to delete on deletion.

If you are bent on archival with versioning, i'd offer you to explore our ONTAP Cloud as well:

In the upcoming 3.1 release (Slated for next month) we will support Cold HDD EBS type, which offer block storage

in price per GB lower than S3. Worth looking at.

3) You can access the target files. Both datasets are active and available at the same time. You can definitely use them without Cloud Sync.

Small note that ties into this question from the previous one - The return direction (S3 -> NFS) release date would be annouced soon and till

then you can use other means for the return journey.

Hope that's helpful

Yaron Haimsohn

Cloud Solutions Architect Team Lead

NetApp Engineering IL

yaronh@netapp.com

[dcornely]

Thanks Yaron, great to hear from you again and appreciate the quick response!