SvSAN and Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud

Any x86 Server

• Turns underlying storage of any x86 server into highly available shared storage within clusters of two servers (nodes) or more.
• Sits on top of the hypervisor as a guest virtual machine and is fully compatible with VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Linux KVM.

High Availability

• Shared storage works through active-active synchronous mirroring between two servers.
• Ensures there is always an exact copy of data on each server.
• If one server fails or is taken offline, the remaining server continues to operate without service interruption.

Lightweight Witness

• Provides highly available shared storage on just two nodes.
• Can be deployed locally or remotely.
• Provides quorum for up to 1,000 clusters.

https://stormagic.com/svsan/ 

Managing cyber protection in a constantly evolving threat landscape is a challenge. Safeguard your data from any threat with Acronis Cyber Protect – the only cyber protection solution that natively integrates data protection and cybersecurity.

Key Features

• Market-leading backup and recovery.
• Integrated anti-ransomware protection.
• Advanced malware protection.
• Centralized protection management.

Typically backup vendors reference the 3-2-1 backup methodology.

• Backblaze – 3-2-1 Backup Strategy
• Veeam – 3-2-1 Rule
• Acronis – Backup Rule

Introducing SvSAN alongside backup ensures an even more resilient architecture through highly available synchronous mirroring.

The value proposition of combining StorMagic SvSAN with Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud includes:

1. SvSAN's hardware flexibility allows organizations to build appropriately sized appliances using standard x86 hardware, helping mitigate supply chain constraints.
2. Fully software-defined storage and protection solutions.
3. Elimination of single points of failure (SPOF) and single points of connectivity (SPOC).
4. Creation of immutable, deduplicated, compressed and dual-authorized backups to protect against ransomware and critical data loss.

The Acronis agent for VMware is deployed to the local ESXi hosts and grants the cloud portal the access required to manage and protect the virtual environment.

The Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud console is hosted by Acronis. The only components requiring installation are the onsite agents that provide communication between the local virtual infrastructure and the central cloud console.

Devices managed by Acronis can include virtual machines, workstations, laptops, servers and other endpoints that require backup, disaster recovery or cybersecurity protection.

Agents and Plans

Like many backup and recovery solutions, the onsite portion of the deployment is handled by an agent. This can be deployed as either a virtual appliance or installed on a Windows server. Using a Windows server also allows locally attached storage, including StorMagic SvSAN mirrored disks, to be used as backup repositories.

Once installed, agents execute the protection plans defined within the Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud portal. The onsite agent itself does not have a management GUI and is administered entirely from the cloud console.

Protection plans define the backup, disaster recovery, security and endpoint protection policies applied to workloads. In production environments these plans typically protect virtual machines, workstations, laptops and other organizational devices.

Plans consist of various licensed Acronis features including Backup, Disaster Recovery, Security, URL filtering, Anti-Virus and other endpoint protection capabilities.

Protection plans can only be applied to devices and workloads that have been added to the Acronis environment. For VMware environments, this is accomplished by deploying a local Agent Appliance that registers with the Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud tenancy.

Download and deploy the ESXi Agent Appliance, then configure it to connect back to your Acronis tenancy.

Deployment consists of importing the appliance and completing the initial configuration wizard.

Once deployed, the appliance simply requires an IP address and connection details for the Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud tenant.

Enter the ESXi or vCenter credentials for the environment containing the virtual machines to be protected.

If required, manually register the appliance using a registration token.

1. Generate a registration token from All devices > Add > Registration token in the Acronis portal.
2. Open the appliance console and press Ctrl + Shift + F2 to access the command line.
3. Run the following command:

register_agent -o register -t cloud -a <your-datacenter> --token <token>

Replace:

• <your-datacenter> with your Acronis cloud URL.
• <token> with the generated registration token.

Once registration completes, the VMware virtual machines will appear under Devices and protection plans can be assigned.

After the VMware environment has been registered, protection plans can be assigned to the discovered virtual machines.

When devices are not located on the local network, an onsite VPN appliance is required to securely connect the remote infrastructure to the Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud portal.

Once downloaded, the VPN appliance requires only minimal configuration to connect to the customer tenancy in the Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud portal.

Selecting Virtual Machines

Select the virtual machines that should receive the configured protection plan.

While virtual machines are backed up to the cloud, if onsite hardware fails, protected workloads can be recovered directly from the Acronis Cloud using the previously deployed VPN appliance to provide secure connectivity back to the customer environment.

• StorMagic 
• StorMagic SvSAN 
• Acronis Cyber Protect