Acronis - 11.7 Update

What’s new in Acronis 11.7?

There are over 500 bug fixes and improvements in Acronis 11.7. This release includes significant changes in how deduplication is handled, while adding new support for operating systems including Windows 10, Windows Server 2016 Technical preview 4, and ESXi 6.0.

What do I really care about in this upgrade?

Along with expanded operating system support, the most exciting features of 11.7 are the new deduplication algorithm and the WAN backup improvements. These are both significant improvements for our partners. The deduplication changes make restoring data from a deduplicated vault much faster, while utilizing much less RAM.

What has actually changed with the deduplication algorithm?

A major cause of performance issues with 11.5 deduplicated vaults centered around the vast number of I/O requests made when trying to get data out of the database. The biggest improvement in 11.7 is the change from a 4kB block size to a 256kB block size. This means that for every data request made, we receive 256kB of data rather than 4kB of data. The increased block size greatly reduces the number of I/O requests need to get data out of the data base

OK, this sounds great but what’s that catch?

Unfortunately, there is a catch: there is no easy way to change a database from using 4kB block sizes to 256kB block sizes.

Moving data into a new 11.7 vault is going to take a very long time. Think 24-48 hours per 1TB of data.

Why so slow? Deduplication works by comparing blocks of data and only storing one copy of each block.  For example, let’s say you have 20 files which are each 16kB. You break all of those files into 4kB pieces. If the first 4kB of all of those files are the same, you keep just one copy of that 4kB chunk and point to it for the other 20 files. However, if you break all of those files to into16kB pieces instead of 4kB pieces, it is entirely possible that the other 12kB of data will be different for all 20 files. To be able to change deduplication block size, you are going to have to restore all 20 of the 16kB files and compare them all against each other again. Basically, you have to restore the data and run the deduplication process all over again. Recovering data from an 11.5 deduplicated database is very slow, which means moving data into the new 11.7 vault is going to take a very long time, too. Again, plan on 24 to 48 hours per 1TB of data.

What is Axcient’s plan for this?

• We will help partners migrate to version 11.7 by creating a new 11.7 storage node.
• The fastest way to get data to 11.7 will be via reseeding your customer’s data.
• If reseeding is not an option for you, we will help migrate your data, one customer at a time, over to 11.7.

1. We will provision a new storage node.
2. We will migrate data to the new storage node. Remember, this takes on average 24-48 hours per 1TB of data migrated. Export time is significantly reduced by exporting only one full image for each agent.
3. Once migration is complete, partners will upgrade agents to 11.7
4. Partners will change the backup destination of each backup job to point to the new storage node.
5. This will likely result in a gap in backups while the export happened.
6. Axcient will hold onto the old 11.5 storage node for 30 days after the last agent has been migrated.