rhipe | Acronis Backup Cloud - Disaster Recovery Use Cases

We've seen that many rhipe Partner's are excited about the features in Acronis Backup Cloud and how it easily enables them to offer Backup-as-a-Service to their customers. Our partners are able to protect customer data both locally and in the cloud, have worry-free licensing options and manage all customer tenants within the same multi-tenant dashboard.

Watch this short video of Acronis Backup Cloud to see if it suits you.

The current Acronis Backup cloud features mainly focus on Backup and Restoration - where it allows a customer to backup their files or folders, disk volumes, applications, mobile devices and even Office 365 mailboxes. Your customer can then manually restore the data to it's original source, or a new location.

Unfortunately there just aren't many use cases for a customer who wishes to have an automated, end-to-end replication and DR failover experience. Here, I am going to share with you some tips and tricks on how we can achieve a semi-auto, DR failover setup, using Acronis Backup Cloud.

Instantly Restore Physical Server or VM in DR as a Virtual Machine

Acronis Backup Cloud allows customers to backup a server or VM as a full machine, and restore it into a VM without an conversion. The following graphic gives you an idea of how the deployment would look in a DR scenario.

The Acronis Backup Cloud Management Consile is hosted in Acronis Datacenter and there would be a few other components that you need to deploy in a Customer and Service Provder enviroment, as shown above.

At Service Provider enviroment, Acronis Storage Gateway or Acronis Storage 2.0 will be required. These components serve as the multi-tenanted data broker between customer source data and Service Provider's storage repository.
At Customer environment, Acronis Agent should be deployed to the source Physical Server(s) or VM(s). The devices will be registered to Acronis Backup Cloud Management via the customer account.
Backup policy can then be configured to backup these devices. In this case, we will go for full machine backup.
The first copy of the backup is recommended to be stored in local storage - this will allow customers to recover quickly over a local network. In Acronis Backup Cloud, you can configure so that the local backup data will be replicated to Cloud storage within the same backup job. Note: if a customer has an ESXi or Hyper-V Host locally, they can also instantly power up the backup data as VM.
The backup data will be replicated to the Service Provider Enviroment and stored in Service Provider Storage. The replicated data in NFS Storage will serve as second copy of the customer data to protect against Disaster at Customer Primary Locaion.
If Service Provider has a standby ESXi or Hyper-V Host, the host can be installed with Acronis Agent and registered to the Customer Account. This will allow the backup data to be powered up instantly into the Host for DR testing or failover. With the VM up and running, the customer will then need to update their network configurations so that their users can access the newly recovered VM.
When performing instant recovery of backup data as VM, the VM will be up and running within muinutes. The recovered VM will be reading and writing to two different disks - the Base sisk (emulated from backup data) and a Delta Disk (tracks all block changes). If the customer wishes to keep the recovered VM, they will need to schedule a downtime to perform Disk Finalisation - merge base and delta disk to avoid the IOP overhead.

Click here for ESXi Finalisation

Click here for Hyper-V Finalisation (some manual steps required)

So, hopefully this gives you an idea of how the customer can perform a quick DR recovery within Acronis Backup Cloud deployment. Currently, an automated DRaaS is not available out of the box from Acronis Backup Cloud yet, but it is within the future roadmap of the product.

Feel free to reach out to me at Acronis@rhipe.com if you have questions or would like more information about Acronis Backup Cloud.

By Alex Lim, Partner Enablement Specialist, rhipe

E: sinefa@rhipe.com T: @rhipeAlex