# Combined Storage Tier

Commvault's combined storage tier stores a small portion of the frequently accessed indexing and metadata in the warm tiers, while storing a major portion of the actual data in the archive tiers, to provide a simplified, cheaper, and quicker data recalls when needed. By placing frequently accessed indexing and metadata in warm tiers, a recall is as simple as a Browse and Restore operation.

By default, Commvault software supports combined storage tier to store data in archive storage tiers.

## Key Benefits

Combined Storage tier has the following key benefits:

- Restores using Browse and Restore occur faster, with no index recall delay.

- Micro pruning is supported and reduces storage consumption.

- Index data can be managed (created, removed) without early deletion charges. (Note that Index data does not follow storage policy retention, so it can be aged sooner.)

- Recalls are faster on combined storage tier, as the metadata (index and deduplication metadata) resides in the warmer tier. As a result, only one pass for data recall is initiated from the archive tier.

## Supported Storage

- Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible

- Amazon S3 Deep Archive

- Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service Archive

- Google Cloud Storage Archive

- Huawei Object Storage Archive

- Microsoft Azure Storage Archive

- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Archive Storage

## Backups

Commvaults combined storage tiers works by placing Commvault metadata used in both deduplication and non-deduplicated backups in the warmer or frequent access tiers. This allows you to perform a simple Browse and Restore of the archival data, without the delay of a cloud archive storage recall.

As a result, more than 90% of the backup data gets stored in the archive tier, while only up to 10% of the data is stored in the warmer tiers.

- Deduplicated and non-deduplicated data is supported in Commvault combined storage tiers.

- For deduplicated data, the backup indexes and deduplication metadata is stored in the warmer tier.

- For non-deduplicated data, the backup index is stored in the warmer tier.

### Backup Sizing

While Cloud Storage services typically grow forever, for planning purposes, the following ratios can be used when sizing your cloud storage for archival use-cases:

- 10% of backup data stored will reside in warm tier

- 90% of backup data store will reside in archive tier

These figures refer to data after deduplication and compression (if used).

## Restores

Restores from combined storage tiers require no additional steps. Simply Browse your data, select the data to restore, and then click Restore.

For more information, see Restoring Data from Archive Cloud Storage.

## Deduplication

Both deduplicated and non deduplicated backups supported.

The following options are enabled on the Deduplication Database Properties:

- Micro Pruning option is enabled by default on all the mount paths associated to the Archive Storage.

- Do not Deduplicate against objects older than 365 day(s) on the Deduplication Database properties. For more information, see Deduplication Database Properties - Settings.

## Related Topics

Configuring Cloud Storage

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