Copyright © Acronis, Inc., 2000-2010
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Setting up the storage infrastructure
Install the storage nodes, add them to the management server (the procedure is similar to the
managed machine registration (p. 358)) and create centralized vaults (p. 351). When creating a
centralized vault, specify the path to the vault, the storage node that will manage the vault, and the
management operations to be performed on the vault.
A managed vault can be organized:
on the hard drives local to the storage node
on a network share
on a Storage Area Network (SAN)
on a Network Attached Storage (NAS)
on a tape library locally attached to the storage node.
The management operations are as follows.
Storage node-side cleanup and validation
Archives, stored in unmanaged vaults, are maintained by the agents (p. 347) that create the archives.
This means that each agent not only backs up data to the archive, but also executes service tasks that
apply to the archive, the retention rules and validation rules specified by the backup plan (p. 349). To
relieve the managed machines of unnecessary CPU load, execution of the service tasks can be
delegated to the storage node. Since the tasks' schedule exists on the machine the agent resides on,
and therefore uses that machine’s time and events, the agent has to initiate the storage node-side
cleanup (p. 358) and the storage node-side validation (p. 359) according to the schedule. To do so,
the agent must be online. Further processing is performed by the storage node.
This functionality cannot be disabled in a managed vault. The next two operations are optional.
Deduplication
A managed vault can be configured as a deduplicating vault. This means that identical data will be
backed up to this vault only once to minimize the network usage during backup and storage space
taken by the archives. For more information, please see the "Deduplication (p. 61)" section in the
User Guide.
Encryption
A managed vault can be configured so that anything written to it is encrypted and anything read
from it is decrypted transparently by the storage node, using a vault-specific encryption key stored
on the node server. In case the storage medium is stolen or accessed by an unauthorized person, the
malefactor will not be able to decrypt the vault contents without access to this specific storage node.
If the archive is already encrypted by the agent, the storage node-side encryption is applied over the
encryption performed by the agent.
1.3.2.3
PXE Server
Acronis PXE Server allows for booting machines into Acronis bootable components through the
network.
The network booting:
Eliminates the need to have a technician onsite to install the bootable media (p. 350) into the
system that has to be booted
