Well known backup software provider, Acronis, has recently entered the hyperconverged infrastructure and software-defined data center market. Without a lot of fanfare, Acronis revealed on January 15th, 2019 that it will sell a hyperconverged appliance that will operate with its renamed Acronis Storage software, now known as Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure 2.5.
Acronis calls its solution a cost-efficient, easy-to-use, and scalable software-defined infrastructure solution. And the company says it uses industry-standard hardware and combines compute, software-defined network, block, file, and object storage workloads so you can work more efficiently. It provides flexible licensing and it can be deployed as a backend for Acronis Files Cloud, Acronis Backup Cloud, Open-Xchange, vSphere, Hyper V, Microsoft Exchange – or serve as shared storage for general needs like documents, graphics, and video files. For simplified management, different workloads can be applied to the same cluster. What’s more, Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure delivers next-gen data protection by incorporating Acronis CloudRAID and Acronis Notary with blockchain, ensuring data immutability and authenticity and preserving essential data and sensitive documents.
With this release, Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure offers a wide range of new features for compute virtualization and software-defined networking, as well as enhancements and stability improvements.
New features include:
Compute. Run virtual machines (technical preview) on Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure nodes in the hyper-converged mode (storage and compute on same node) or the traditional way (storage and compute on separate nodes)
- Virtual machine management: run, resize, migrate, log in to console
- Private software-defined networking for virtual machines (VXLAN)
- Storage policies for virtual machines. Easy-to-use data redundancy options for virtual machine volumes
- Easy to configure high availability for compute service and virtual machines
- Supported guest operation systems: CentOS 6, CentOS 7, RHEL 7, Debian 9, Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016
- Full Windows guests support with automatic installation of paravirtualization drivers (virtio) during installation from ISO
Better performance and high availability for iSCSI targets. The new iSCSI target subsystem and high availability engine reduce I/O hangs by 2-4 times during node failures, making them barely noticeable for end-user applications. Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) with active-passive mode.
Fiber Channel support. Use Fiber Channel cards to export block storage.
RDMA and InfiniBand support. Up to 25% better I/O latency and lower CPU utilization on InfiniBand, RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) and iWARP (Internet Wide-area RDMA Protocol).
New comprehensive monitoring:
- Built-in monitoring with pre-configured Prometheus and Grafana.
- Grafana dashboards for nodes, disks, network, latency, performance, storage services
- New charts with tooltips in Web Control Panel, I/O latency charts, new physical and logical space charts
Performance improvements for all-flash configurations. Get more IOPS with multi-threaded I/O on all-flash clusters. New fast-path approach in core of Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure allows to eliminate additional latency and implement fast multi-threaded I/O handling in Linux kernel.
New comprehensive command-line tool. Support for more operations. Unified output for all commands: text table, JSON
Built-in ReadyKernel eliminates downtime on operation system update. Based on kpatch technology, ReadyKernel is a live patching of a running Linux kernel to apply kernel hotfixes and CVEs in seconds.
New infrastructure networking
UI and UX improvements:
- New navigation menu
- New controls and fresh UI
Single repository for all components. Easy and integrated cluster updates from the unified RPM repository.
Acronis Backup Gateway improvements:
- Improved backup protocol (higher backup speed, better resilience for network lags) for Acronis Backup Cloud 8.0 and Acronis Backup 15 coming in 2019.
- It is possible to configure geo-replication for Acronis Backup Gateway via CLI. Setup via UI is planned for the next release.
- Yandex.Cloud support.
Other enhancements:
- New high availability engine significantly improves cluster reaction time to node failure for all services.
- New internal cluster DNS service that improves cluster services discovery.
- Better overall stability and performance.
