Copyright © Acronis, Inc., 2000-2010
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2.11
Understanding centralized management
This section contains an overview of centralized data protection with Acronis Backup & Recovery 10.
Please be sure you have an understanding of how data is protected on a single machine (p. 24)
before reading this section.
2.11.1
Basic concepts
Applying backup policies and tracking their execution
To protect data on a single machine, you install on the machine an agent (p. 347) or multiple agents
for various data types you want to protect. You connect the console to the machine and create a
backup plan (p. 349) or multiple backup plans.
What if you have to manage hundreds of machines? It takes time to create a backup plan on each
machine, while the plans may be quite similar – you need to back up, say, the system drive and the
users' documents. Tracking the plans' execution on each machine separately is also time-consuming.
To be able to propagate the management operations to multiple machines, you install Acronis
Backup & Recovery 10 Management Server (p. 357) and register (p. 358) the machines on the server.
After that you can create groups of machines and thus manage multiple machines as a whole. You
can protect all of them or your selection by setting up a common backup plan, which is called a
backup policy (p. 349).
Once you apply the policy to a group of machines, the management server deploys the policy to each
of the machines. On each machine the agents find the items to back up and create corresponding
centralized backup plans (p. 351). You will be able to monitor the policies’ statuses on a single screen
and navigate, if required, to each machine, plan or task to see their status and log entries. The
management server also enables you to monitor and manage the agent's locally originated activities.
Since you connect the console to the management server rather than to each machine and perform
all management operations through the central management unit, this way of management is called
centralized management (p. 351).
Centralized management does not rule out the direct management (p. 352) of each machine. You can
connect the console to each machine and perform any direct management operation. However,
centralized backup plans can be managed through the management server only, since a well-thought
out policy functions automatically and rarely requires human intervention.
Using the management server, you can create one or more centralized archive storages (centralized
vaults (p. 351)), which will be shared by the registered machines. A centralized vault can be used by
any backup policy as well as by any backup plan created on the registered machines using direct
management.
Organizing a managed archive storage
What should the capacity of your centralized vault be? What if transferring sizeable backups to the
vault will cause network congestion? Does backup of an online production server affect the server
performance? To ensure that the centralized backup will not slow down business processes in your
company and to minimize the resources required for the data protection, you install Acronis Backup
& Recovery 10 Storage Node (p. 358) and configure it to manage a centralized vault or multiple
centralized vaults. Such vaults are called managed vaults (p. 356).
The storage node helps the agent deduplicate (p. 352) backups before transferring them to managed
vaults and deduplicates the backups already saved in the vaults. Deduplication results in reducing
