Acronis, a global provider of cyber protection, released Acronis Cyber Infrastructure 4.0, a significant update to the company’s software-defined infrastructure solution. Featuring more than 350 new capabilities and enhancements, the update helps Acronis partners and end users improve the performance and manageability of their infrastructure while strengthening the security and availability of their data.
With 31% of companies reporting daily cyber attacks and half (50%) being targeted at least once a week, organisations can face costly downtime and direct financial losses. Yet too many IT teams and managed service providers (MSPs) still rely on a patchwork of legacy solutions, which is expensive, time-consuming, and complicated to maintain - and the lack of solution integration still leaves gaps in the defences.
Software-defined data centre
Organisations require security, immediate availability, and reliable performance from their infrastructure"
As a scale-out, cost-efficient, multi-purpose, and storage solution for cyber protection, Acronis Cyber Infrastructure is a fast and universal building-block for any software-defined data centre or edge workload. It uses any industry-standard hardware and combines block, file, and object storage workloads with compute and software-defined network capabilities.
“Given the speed of business today, organisations require security, immediate availability, and reliable performance from their infrastructure,” said Serguei “SB” Beloussov, Acronis Founder and Executive Officer. “In delivering on our vision of comprehensive cyber protection, integrating Acronis Cyber Infrastructure is a critical component for many of our customers and partners, which is why the enhancements we’ve made as part of this update are so vital.”
Enhancements to storage networking
Among the performance-enhancing changes, erasure coding improves writing performance and latency for hybrid and all flash tiers up to 50%. Similarly, enhancements to storage networking have increased the performance of multi-thread workloads - with random reads improving up to 40%. The new update also ensures the safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity, and security (SAPAS) of an organisation’s data, applications, and systems.
Among the most notable features included in the update are:
- Improved manageability
- Flexible reconfiguration of cluster networking is available with an automated procedure that allows changes to the configuration of network roles or IP addresses in the cluster.
- Customise S3 geo-replication on the user/bucket level.
- Improved monitoring for S3 and NFS services.
- Set storage limits for IOPS and bandwidth for protected workloads and secure stable storage performance.
- Heightened availability
- Increase data availability by spreading storage data among new failure domains: room, row, and rack. A failure domain defines a scope within which services might go down together.
- Enhanced security
- Management of access to S3 geo-replication is available for buckets with access control lists.
- Users can enable the access log via Amazon S3 API and get detailed information about the objects in their buckets.
Cyber protection strategy
In addition to running on industry-standard hardware, it also comes pre-installed on Acronis Cyber Appliance
Acronis Cyber Infrastructure is used in Acronis data centres around the world, which support millions of workloads and more than 5,000PB from 500,000 businesses. It is proven technology that enables them to build their cyber protection strategy with confidence. For the full changelog, including all enhancements in Acronis Cyber Infrastructure 4.0, one can refer to the release notes available on the company’s website.
In addition to running on industry-standard hardware, it also comes pre-installed on Acronis Cyber Appliance. The full integration of hardware and software delivers a plug-and-play compatibility that ensures fast, hassle-free deployments in any location, and provides seamless support for other cyber protection solutions like Acronis Cyber Protect and Acronis Cyber Cloud.
Physical network infrastructure
In addition to the version 4.0 enhancement, Acronis Cyber Appliance also delivers new capabilities, including the ability to be added to an existing cluster that’s deployed on another appliance or other hardware. Users can also view any available network interface and connectivity options during the installation, making it a better fit for the physical network infrastructure of an existing data centre.