night prism
IHAC who is keen to use BlueXP dark site edition to orchestrate SnapMirror Cloud replication from on-premise ONTAP to on-premise StorageGRID for backup purposes (and to use DataLock). I understand this BlueXP use case is free but cannot find it in writing. Is this use case free? (no extra license costs required)
If anyone can help with pointing me to where this is officially documented (or tell me I’m wrong) would most appreciated. Thank you.
night prism
Anyone know?
The best I could find is a slide deck from 2023 which says “One license per source ONTAP cluster … not required if using Cloud Backup Service”. I take it CBS was the old name for BlueXP. The customer has ONTAP one and SnapMirror cloud licensing so looks very much like this is free, just not 100% certain. Would be great to have something official.
short plank
Using BlueXP B&R always comes with a licensing cost. So no, it's not free, even in dark site configurations.
You always need to license the logical used capacity of the data you want to protect/back-up. The backup destination does not really matter here. What you're paying for is all the features BlueXP B&R enables as an orchestrator. Like single-file restore, managing the snapshots on the ONTAP system, etc.
So you would need to purchase a BYOL and then manually upload it to your BlueXP connector.
Everything about licensing: https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/bluexp-backup-recovery/task-licensing-cloud-backup.html
Here you can see the different deployment modes of BlueXP: https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/bluexp-setup-admin/concept-modes.html
This would be your scenario where your connector is in private mode: https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/bluexp-backup-recovery/task-backup-onprem-private-cloud.html
And yes, CBS is the old name of BlueXP B&R.
Regarding SnapMirror Cloud licensing: This is something different. You don't need a SnapMirror Cloud license (aka the old Hybrid Cloud bundle) on your source cluster with BlueXP B&R.
This is only needed when you're using 3rd-party orchestrators like from ProLion, Cleondris, etc.
short plank
The only way to backup your data from on-prem ONTAP to on-prem StorageGRID (using SnapMirror Cloud technology) without any additional licensing costs is by using the System Manager as the orchestrator. This went under the radar but it is possible (and supported) since ONTAP 9.9.1: https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/ontap/task_dp_back_up_to_cloud.html
Yes, you need a "SnapMirror Cloud API key" (which should not be mixed up with the "SnapMirror Cloud license") but you get that for free from NetApp.
But this is really rudimentary, you can simply backup the volume and that's about it. No object-locking, no archiving tiers, no index so no searching, no single-file restore. And officially you can only restore to the original source-cluster.
(Actually single-file restore is possible via CLI but very complex and not supported.)
I think we only have one customer who does that because only a simple backup is needed to another medium (non-ONTAP) and the StorageGRID was already available.
