Prepopulation, when should I be using it?
Applies to
- AltaVault (AVA)
- prepopulation
Answer
- When restores are failing in any capacity, you want to check prepopulation to make sure the restore data is easily obtainable
- The retrieval speed is the time it takes to make the data available for download after you send the initial request to the cloud
- Due to this delay, if data is not available on the local cache, it cannot be paged back from the cloud on demand
- In such cases, you must first manually restore the files to be read from the cloud to the local cache on AltaVault using either the prepopulation GUI or CLI commands
- After the data is restored from the cloud, it can be read from the local cache
- When recovering data from the archive tier (cloud), NetApp requires that all the data segments related to a restore or retrieve by the backup application be present on the AltaVault cache first
- This avoids error or retry conditions by the backup or archive application while it waits on the cloud service provider to send the data to the AltaVault cache
- To recover the data segments associated with the files to the AltaVault cache, use the AltaVault prepopulation feature
- This limits the time penalty for data retrieval to the waiting period associated your selected retrieval mode
- If several, separate retrieve requests are made for individual data segments (for example, when a backup application restores files sequentially, where each file is not in the AltaVault cache), this can slow down the overall retrieval process from the cloud service provider, and the overall recovery
- To recover the data segments associated with the files to the AltaVault cache, use the AltaVault prepopulation feature
Additional Information
- Additional information can be found in the NetApp AltaVault Cloud Integrated Storage 4.4.1 Administration Guide starting on page 261