The French hyperscaler OVHcloud has made its Cold Archive online storage service generally available. It offers inexpensive long-term storage with cost per GB as low as €0.0013 per month. Cold Archive was previewed from last December and competes with AWS’ Glacier Deep Archive, which comes in at 0.0016 per GB per month.
Cold Archive – which offers the same functionality as its AWS counterpart – stores data on tape via IBM libraries and in object storage format. Backup and restore are handled by Atempo Miria.
As with S3 Glacier Deep Archive, the goal of the new service is to store archives long-term with an eye on clients. running scans on the data they hold. OVHcloud highlights use cases in video production, health data that must be kept for decades, and accounting and HR documents.
OVHcloud also emphasizes the archiving of backup copies that could allow restoration in future worst-case scenarios, or production data that deserves to be stored until it can be analyzed via future analysis tools. AI.
Cold Archive is deployed in four data centers with at least 100 km between sites. OVHcloud explained that these will be dedicated data centers, physically separate from those where the virtual machines of its customers will operate. In this, the company may have in mind the lessons learned as a result the fire at its Strasbourg data center in 2021.
The four data centers are in France and can therefore be considered as offering data sovereignty customers in this territory. Data is shared between sites using erasure coding to build resilience.
IBM 3592 tape storage
Each site is equipped with tape libraries that can access 18,000 cartridges to provide a capacity of approximately 3 exabytes.
Perhaps surprisingly, the format used is not the popular LTO tape standard, but IBM’s proprietary 3592, also resold by SpectraLogic. Specifically, the cartridges are of the 3592-60F generation, AKA TS1160, which store 20TB raw per cartridge or 60TB compressed.
Generation 60F, the sixth, was launched in 2018. Since then, IBM has announced the TS1165 (30 TB raw per cartridge), TS1170 (40 TB) and TS1165 (80 TB) iterations, but these have not emerged despite planning a new generation every three years.
By comparison, the latest LTO format, LTO-9, can hold 18TB of raw capacity or 45TB of compressed capacity.
Data is stored with AES-256 encryption and accessed through the S3 object storage protocol. Access fees and constraints apply, as with AWS and other cloud providers. OVHcloud does not specify access times, but reads are likely to be slow, so it will be necessary to place data on faster access disks (HDD or SSD) to allow processing, for example, and that means that the cost incurred per GB will increase significantly to €0.007 per GB per month.
Restoring data from archives to production machines will cost €0.005 per GB. Exporting data from OVHcloud will cost €0.01 per GB transferred. This may be in cases where there is a need to restore archived data to a private data center or to make the data available for an application running in another cloud.
Atempo Miria Powers Backup
Atempo is a long-time partner of OVHcloud. It offers three backup tools: Lina for workstations, Tina for servers and Miria for data. It is the last of them that OVHcloud uses behind the backup interface offered to customers.
Miria offers a large number of functions that can help in the rapid transfer of data between remote locations, such as on-the-fly compression and decompression, and the ability to restore data to a different format.
Miria has dozens of software connectors capable of extracting from the native format of the solution and re-encoding it to that of another solution. Among these are the OVHcloud and IBM drivers. Using them, Cold Archive provides a portal that allows defining object storage services with just a few mouse clicks.