
Building blocks of a Vail Solution:

Connection Types (Vail Nodes)
A Vail node is a software package that can be deployed on a number of options:
- As a virtual machine or on a BlackPearl storage platform.
- Utilize existing storage
- Utilize cloud storage – AWS, GCP, Azure
- Utilize Spectra storage
- Create a local glacier* tier (tape behind BlackPearl)
Lifecycle Policies Drive Vail Solutions
A Lifecycle policy in a Vail solution consists of rules that dictate where objects are stored and the length of time they are stored in each storage location. Each lifecycle policy is created by the administrator to fit the de- sired workflow and retention periods. Users can determine the placement of objects in the bucket by specifying the number of copies the rule will keep and the specific storage pools to use. The available storage targets consist of public cloud storage tiers, and local storage under control of a Vail node that has been integrated into a Vail Sphere.


Hybrid Cloud Integrations
Vail presents both on-premises and cloud-based storage options within the lifecycle policies. Copies can be made immediately or after, in any location, to any storage target or medium, and presented to the user as one simple storage system that reacts to their immediate needs.
From storage to compute, Vail integrates with the major cloud providers and any cloud using native S3 protocols. This eliminates cloud lock-in and provides the ability to leverage the cloud and cloud services that fit the desired workflow.
Glacier Storage for Long-Term Retention
Creating a local glacier repository is possible with the help of Vail. Glacier storage delivers substantial cost savings and infinite salability. The benefits of a Vail solution cannot be overstated. The fact that long-life object storage disk and literally unlimited tape capacity can be realized, makes your own glacier storage tier an easily attainable reality. The seamless combination of affordable disk and ultra-cost-efficient tape means that any company’s growing data universe can be organized and managed in a whole new way and without any cloud lock-in limitations.

Vail Policy Engine Management
For quite some time storage vendors have provided solutions that allow for setting time-based policies that drive migration of data to lower cost storage tiers. Vail lifecycle policies add additional dimensions to this by allowing for the specification of how many copies, the geographic locations of those copies and what storage tier those copies exist at a particular time. To highlight the power of this, consider a customer that has a main data center, multiple smaller remote data centers and employees working remotely that do not have access to any of these centers. For this example, the main data centers has a large amount of disk storage along with a tape system while, all the remote data centers have a small amount of flash storage. Additionally, the customer’s bucket lifecycle bucket may consist of three distinct phases; for the first 30 days users need immediate access to the data, for the next 60 days us- ers can accept slower access to their data, but it still needs to be sub-second, and for anything older then 90 days users are willing to wait for a restoration of the data that could take multiple minutes.



This short fun animated video shows how Spectra’s Vail, a distributed multi-cloud software, unifies data to enable on-premises applications and cloud services — no matter where data is created or stored.
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