What is Data Cold Storage?

Cold storage is a computer system or mode of operation designed for the retention of inactive data. Data suitable for cold storage may include: information a business is required to keep for regulatory compliance, video, photographs, and data that is saved for backup, archival or disaster recovery purposes. Public cloud services targeting cold storage include Amazon Glacier, Google Cloud Storage Nearline and Microsoft Azure Cool Blob Storage. These services offer lower data availability at a lower price per gigabyte than alternative cloud storage offerings sold by Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

What is the case for Connected Backup(CB)?

Connected Backup is an Enterprise End Point Backup product. Connected Backup backs up files on users computers and stores the backed up files in a centralized location. If users lose files on their computers, they can retrieve the lost files from the stored backups.

Since all the data held by CB is backup data, overtime, the backups becomes huge and consume more storage. Also, backups which are months old cannot be deleted and retrievals from them are also infrequent. So these archives need to be moved to a low-per storage. The new low-cost high-latency cloud storage offering from Microsoft Azure called the "Cool Blob Storage" seems to be a viable options with cost-savings and the obvious benefits of cloud.

What is the idea?

The idea is to integrate CB with Azure Blob Storage using a connector service so that older archives that are residing on the CB Server can be pushed to the Azure Blob storage and can be retrieved whenever necessary.

References:

Introduction to Azure Blob Storage