Chapter 11. Advanced Copy Services 499
For more information about the IBM Cloud Object Storage portfolio, see this web page.
11.3.1  Considerations for using Transparent Cloud Tiering
Transparent Cloud Tiering can help to address certain business needs. When considering 
whether to use Transparent Cloud Tiering, adopt a combination of business and technical 
views of the challenges and determine whether Transparent Cloud Tiering can solve both of 
those needs.
The use of Transparent Cloud Tiering can help businesses to manipulate data as shown in 
the following examples: 
/SM590000Creating a consistent snapshot of dynamically changing data
/SM590000Creating a consistent snapshot of production data to facilitate data movement or migration 
between systems running at different locations
/SM590000Creating a snapshot of production data sets for application development and testing
/SM590000Creating a snapshot of production data sets for quality assurance
/SM590000Using secure data tiering to off-premises cloud providers
From a technical standpoint, ensure that you evaluate the network capacity and bandwidth 
requirements to support your data migration to off-premises infrastructure. To maximize 
productivity, you must match your amount of data that needs to be transmitted off cloud plus 
your network capacity.
From a security standpoint, ensure that your on-premises or off-premises cloud infrastructure 
supports your requirements in terms of methods and level of encryption.
Regardless of your business needs, Transparent Cloud Tiering within the IBM Spectrum 
Virtualize can provide opportunities to manage the exponential data growth and to manipulate 
data at low cost.
Today, many Cloud Service Providers offers several storage-as-services solutions, such as 
content repository, backup, and archive. Combining all of these services, your IBM Spectrum 
Virtualize can help you solve many challenges related to rapid data growth, scalability, and 
manageability at attractive costs.
11.3.2  Transparent Cloud Tiering as backup solution and data migration
Transparent Cloud Tiering can also be used as backup and data migration solution. In certain 
conditions, it can be easily applied to eliminate the downtime that is associated with the 
needs to import and export data.
When Transparent Cloud Tiering is applied as your backup strategy, IBM Spectrum Virtualize 
uses the same FlashCopy functions to produce point-in-time snapshot of an entire volume or 
set of volumes.
To ensure the integrity of the snapshot, it might be necessary to flush the host operating 
system and application cache of any outstanding reads or writes before the snapshot is 
performed. Failing to flush the host operating system and application cache can produce 
inconsistent and useless data.
Demonstration: The IBM Client Demonstration Center has a demo that is available at this 
web page.