x360Recover – Release Notes for 8.1.0

 Release Notes for 8.1.0

This is a Feature release. The primary purpose of this release is to enhance the performance, resiliency and reliability of off-site replication using our new Resumable Replication engine.

Several new enhancements were also added to improve various aspects of the user experience.  Enhancements have been made to ConnectWise, Alerting, the x360Recover Analysis Tool, and Remote Assist in this release.

Action Items:

1. Please verify that Enable Auto Update is Enabled on the Settings -> Update Manager page on each of your x360Recover devices.

2. It is also recommended that you Enable Auto-Enable Remote Assist When Upgrading so that remote access will be available to our development team should something go wrong with your upgrade. 

3. Resumable Replication utilizes a new Vault Transfer Service, VT2, which uses a different network port number. Please adjust the firewall settings for any self hosted vault to allow incoming connections on TCP port 9081.

IMPORTANT: Stemming from issues discovered during the recent Ubuntu OS upgrade, it is important that you review your Firewall settings in regard to your x360Recover devices in order to prevent issues with future upgrades and ongoing security updates:

• Ubuntu upgrades and updates require your devices to retrieve installation packages from public download repositories located all around the globe. To minimize the risk of packages failing to be accessible, please ensure that your firewall is configured as follows
  • All x360Recover devices should have direct access to the Internet behind a simple NAT translation. x360Recover devices should not be located behind a proxy service, either implicitly or transparently
  • x360Recover devices should be excluded from streaming packet inspection, gateway anti-virus scanners, content filtering services, and other malware detection systems that might kill running network connections
  • x360Recover devices should not be required to enter a password or login to a firewall or router in order to access the Internet
  • Each x360Recover device should be assigned a static IP address to prevent issues should the local DHCP server host be unavailable
  • Each x360Recover device should be assigned a public DNS server. It is recommended to use Google’s public DNS servers: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

Summary of Enhancements in x360Recover Release 8.1.0 

• Resumable Replication
• Vault Transfer Server 2
• ConnectWise settings field validation
• Endpoint Management Service
• Integrated Analysis Tool (requires Agent 2.22+)
• Appliance Password Reset Tool
• License Alerting improvements
• Additional command line tools to assist Axcient support

Summary of Bug Fixes

• Many fixes to replication engine
• Seeding and Migration bug fixes
• Global Management data collection fixes
• Minor fixes to ConnectWise ticketing

What is Resumable Replication?

The new Resumable Replication engine no longer stages backup snapshots in the aristosbay folder on the Vault for later ingestion.  Now snapshots are written directly to their ZFS storage targets using native ZFS operations end to end.  Interrupted transfers can be immediately resumed from the last successfully delivered data block without have to perform a long, CPU intensive search to restart the transfer.

What does this mean for me and my Vaults? Overall Vault transfer performance will now be 3x to 5x faster than the previous model.  With Legacy replication, many systems transfer data to the staging area simultaneously, but only a single PS can be ingested at a time. Additionally, the system touches every block of data 3 times, writing it to aristosbay, then reading it from aristosbay and writing it again to the Protected System partition in the storage pool. 

With Resumable Replication we only touch the data once, writing it directly to the storage pool as it streams in over the Internet. All Protected Systems commit their data simultaneously, so there is no single-threaded ingestion bottleneck. This provides a 60% decrease in total IOPs necessary to commit the data to the Vault!

So how will it work?

Once both your Vaults and Appliances are upgraded to 8.1.0 Resumable Replication will automatically be enabled. Any Protected Systems that are not in sync with the Vault and have a backlog of snapshots waiting for ingestion will pause further replication. Once the Vault has completed ingesting all outstanding snapshots in aristosbay, that Protected System will immediately resume replication using the new Resumable Replication system.  As more and more Protected Systems on your Vault (and across the entire Axcient datacenter) catch up and transition into Resumable Replication mode, storage performance will improve, creating a cascading effect to speed along the ingestion of larger and larger backlogged systems.