Installation Guide

CHAPTER 2
Planning Acronis Storage
Infrastructure
To plan your Acronis Storage infrastructure, you will need to decide on the hardware configuration of each
server, plan the Acronis Storage networks, decide on the redundancy method (and mode) to use, and decide
which data will be kept on which storage tier.
Information in this chapter is meant to help you complete all of these tasks.
2.1 Understanding Acronis Storage
Architecture
The fundamental component of Acronis Storage is a cluster: a group of physical servers interconnected by
network. Each server in a cluster is assigned one or more roles and typically runs services that correspond to
these roles:
storage role: chunk service or CS
metadata role: metadata service or MDS
network roles:
iSCSI access point service (iSCSI)
Acronis Backup Gateway access point service (ABGW)
S3 gateway (access point) service (GW)
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