Welcome SteelStore customers!

[rdines]

Greetings past, present, and future SteelStore customers. As you've likely heard by now, SteelStore is now a part of NetApp. Our goal is to make this transition as painless as possible for you, so feel free to use this space to reach out with comments and questions. As I've said earlier, we think this is great news for customers and partners.

New to SteelStore and want to know how it can help? Here are four common use-cases where your peers are using SteelStore and the cloud to augment and improve their backup and archive strategies:

• Backup modernization or refresh. If you're sick of backups not meeting windows, tape restores failing, or backup overall just taking too much time to manage, you know it's time to modernize your backup architecture. This might include replacing old tape architectures, or old disk-based backup appliances/virtual tape libraries with a cloud integrated storage appliance.

• Adding cloud-integrated backup. Many companies have already made the move to a modern disk-based backup architectures, but still seek a cloud tier for long-term retention, or to replace a secondary appliance and data center.

• Cold storage target. Do you have large volumes of file data that are infrequently accessed or modified? The cloud can serve as an inexpensive place to store them. With SteelStore's industry leading deduplication, you could be paying pennies per GB per YEAR for your data in the cloud.

• Archival storage target. The last common use-case is to store data in the cloud with SteelStore from inactive archives in your enterprise archive software or from Oracle or SQL Server database logs. Because SteelStore makes cloud storage even more secure and durable you won't ever need to worry about migrating from one tape format to another.

[David_vde]

We already use NetApp SnapVault and Snapmirror as a backup solution, no tapes.

Any plans of making the Steelhead a Snapmirror destination? Leveraging the FAS SnapM irror technology.

[rdines]

Glad to hear you're already a NetApp customer and have a tapeless backup system! Today, SteelStore is not a native target for SnapMirror or SnapVault. SteelStore does work with SnapProtect and many other backup software providers to send backup and archive data to the cloud.

[zafarirfan]

In Cold storage mode.

I have a customer that have 1 TB of logs data being generated from 100+ servers.  I want to use  Steelstore in cold storage mode so once the data is in Steelstore it can be moved to cloud.

Can you please walk me through the process of how my Ubuntu clients will dump logs files to Steelstore then steelstore will send them to cloud ?

Also is the logs data that is coming to Steelstore will be directly sent to cloud or it will be kept in Steelstore and then at a later date sent to cloud  ?

[chriswong]

Hi Zafarirfan,

The short answer: From a SteelStore perspective you would configure at least 1 NFS export for Ubuntu clients to mount using NFS. Data is streamed to the cloud as soon as it is processed by SteelStore, to provide offsite protection in the event of an onsite problem or disaster.

The long answer: Depending on your setup, you might want to have each client going to a unique NFS target on SteelStore. Generally, we recommend you send data from multiple clients to a single centralized server, which then migrates or does data policy movement/management of the data to and from SteelStore, rather than have each client directly "dump" data onto SteelStore. I would recommend you check with your NetApp sales or technical partner account team to make sure that the use case and SteelStore configuration are appropriately set up.

[zafarirfan]

Hello,

Can someone please respond and let me know what is the differnece in different support level offered with SteeStore. 

Quote doesn't tell me anything or what is the differnece between the three levels of support .

Thanks 

[chriswong]

Hi Zafarirfan,

The 3 levels of support provide increasing levels of support responsiveness with regards to product replacement. Gold provides 24 hour (next business day) replacement of parts. Gold Plus provides 4 hour replacement of parts, and Platinum provides 4 hour replacement of parts along with a field engineer to help install it. The last two are subject to location and availability I believe (but you should check with the sales team to confirm the availability).

Regards,

Christopher

[zafarirfan]

Thanks  so much. 

[zafarirfan]

NetApp,

Customer is now askikng for a quote for virutal Alta vault appliane.   Quote doesn't give any option for virutal appliacne. 

Please advice.   Is the virutal applaianc  is quotabel now or it will be available at a later date ?

let me know. 

[chriswong]

Hi,

Virtual AltaVault should be quotable starting today.

Regards,

Christopher