Measures reported by ExGdRetnSpTest

ExaGrid is Tiered Backup Storage with a front-end disk-cache Landing Zone and separate Retention Tier containing all retention data. Backups are written directly to the “network-facing” ExaGrid disk-cache Landing Zone for fast backup performance. The most recent backups are kept in their full undeduplicated form for fast restores.

Once the data is committed to the Landing Zone, it is tiered into a “non-network-facing” long-term retention repository where the data is adaptively deduplicated and stored as deduplicated data objects to reduce the storage costs of long-term retention data. As data is tiered to the Retention Tier, it is deduplicated and stored in a series of objects and metadata. As with other object storage systems, the ExaGrid system objects and metadata are never changed or modified which makes them immutable, allowing only for the creation of new objects or deletion of old objects when retention is reached. The backups in the retention tier can be any number of days, weeks, months, or years that is required.

If the space in the retention repository is insufficient to hold the deduplicated data, then, critical data may be lost and the whole concept of backups and restores may fail in the target enviorrnment. In order to maintain a repository for the backups that are deduplicated in the retention repository, it is essential for the administrators to periodically monitor the space usage of the retention repository. The ExGdRetnSpTest test helps administrators in this regard!

This test reports the space utilization of the retention repository in the target ExaGrid Backup server. Using this test, administrators can figure out abnormal space usage patterns and proactively add additional space to the retention repository before data loss occurs.

Outputs of the test : One set of results for the target ExaGrid Backup Server being monitored.

The measures made by this test are as follows: