For Service Pack 11 and more recent service packs, streaming backups and IntelliSnap backup copies for Amazon are enhanced to provide significantly faster backups. EBS optimization is enabled for the Amazon instance (VSA proxy) that performs the backup operation.
The VSA proxy should be a compute-optimized instance hosted in the same Amazon account and region as the instance that are being backed up.
By default, the enhanced backup process creates temporary optimized volumes from snapshots during the backup and mounts the volumes on the VSA proxy. (The volumes on the source instance are not modified.) For volumes that are 4 GB or larger, the volume type for the backup is changed to Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 block express volumes), and the IOPS for the volumes is set to 1000 times the disk size, up to a maximum value of 64000 IOPS for non nitro instance types, and up to 256000 IOPS for a Nitro instance types.
Caution
Using the Commvault HotAdd transport mode with EBS io1 and io2 volumes can add significant additional storage cost to your monthly Amazon bill. Please consult the Amazon EBS pricing page and assess whether your data protection use-case justifies the additional investment in accelerated EBS performance.
Using IOPS volumes for the backup results are much faster reads for the backup. For volumes that are smaller than 4 GB, the volume type does not change.
The change in volume type might result in increased costs for the duration of the backup process, but after the backup is completed the cleanup process removes the io2 disk and deletes the temporary IOPS volumes.
Procedure
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Create additional settings on the VSA proxy to enable dynamic adjustment of IOPS, to adjust the maximum IOPS value, or to disable optimized volume backup operations.
For instructions about adding additional settings from the CommCell Console, see Adding or Modifying an Additional Setting.
Additional Setting
Category
Type
Value
VirtualServer
Integer
Enter 1 to enable dynamic adjustments to IOPS values during volume backups, and to reduce the chance of failures caused by exceeding AWS IOPS limits. When this additional setting is enabled, volumes are created with the smallest possible IOPS values, and then modified to the optimized values only when required.
For SP13 and more recent service packs, this additional setting is enabled by default.
VirtualServer
Integer
Enter a value from 100-20000 to change the maximum IOPS value per volume that can be used for volumes that are larger then 4 GB.
VirtualServer
Integer
Enter 0 to disable optimized volume backups.
VirtualServer
String
Enter a value of io1, io2, or gp3