Managing tiering storage rules

Tiering storage rules are designed to help you balance the price and performance tradeoffs of disk, cloud, and tape storage to make the best use of these different storage tiers. You can initially back up data to directory-container storage pools, which are defined on disk, to take advantage of the typically faster read and write capabilities of disk storage. To set the requirements for moving data from disk storage to cloud or tape storage, you create a tiering storage rule and configure it to run daily.

When you create the tiering storage rule, you must specify an age threshold. The age is measured from the last time that the file was backed up. (For incremental backup operations, a file is backed up only when a change is detected.) Data that meets the specified age threshold is called older data.

You can specify that all of the older data is tiered, including the latest version of the data (known as active data) and previous versions (inactive data). Alternatively, you can limit the tiering operation so that only inactive data is tiered. Or you can specify a tiering storage rule that does not tier data; instead, the subrules of the tiering storage rule specify how data is tiered.

The data that meets all specified requirements for tiering is called eligible data. If a tiering storage rule is active, the server processes the rule daily and moves eligible data to the target pool.

To view the tiering storage rules that are defined to hub or spoke servers, open the Storage Rules page. From this page, you can also create tiering storage rules.