Acronis Disaster Recovery Service: possible transports
Acronis Disaster Recovery as a Service utilizes the following solutions:
- Acronis Backup Advanced
- NetApp
- FalconStor
- Proprietary application level data replication (Active Directory, Exchange and SQL replication... etc.)
- CAFS based replication
Acronis Backup Advanced, as opposed to other solutions, provides flexibility in selecting items to protect: the either entire machine (all disks), a particular disk, a folder, or even a file. Therefore it efficiently utilizes available resources depending on your needs. NetApp and FalconStor operate on the level of disks (volumes) only.
NetApp and FalconStor, in contrast to Acronis Backup Advanced, are exposed as storage devices which can be attached to servers configured for protection. They allow setting up replication between 2 storage devices located on different hosts. The backup is done by creating a snapshot of a logical device (volume) and applying the snapshot to the target device (volume). So they act as two hard drives synchronized over TCP/IP. Acronis Backup Advanced, on the contrary, is not exposed as storage to the protected servers, it is a software-based solution for creating backups (files in a special format) on the storage nodes.
When proprietary application level data replication is used as a transport, you need to set it up between the source and destination servers by the means of the selected software. For example, to set up MS SQL replication you need to configure the publisher on the source server and the subscriber on the target SQL server via MS SQL management studio. In case the source server goes down you will be required to perform the failover procedure to the target SQL server. In this case, Acronis only provides a VM in the cloud. Acronis Disaster Recovery Service makes no distinction between the roles of such servers - both source and destination servers are considered to be primary (a subject for protection).
CAFS-based replication allows you to replicate the contents of a CIFS shared folder into Acronis cloud using LCHM - local cloud hub manager. In this case, you will be able to recover a file by browsing the remote storage via the recovery console or restore the file to either the original local CIFS share or any other CIFS share in the local environment. In the latter case, the local hub appliance performs the restore operation.