x360Recover - Direct-to-Cloud (D2C) – Axcient

Axcient’s x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud (D2C) provides MSPs with Axcient BC/DR without the cost and maintenance of local hardware appliances.

Experience the same full-featured image-based backups of traditional x360Recover, without the expense of deploying or managing a local appliance.

Features available in Direct-to-Cloud (D2C)

Workstation protection: Chain-free, image-based backups are sent directly to the Axcient Cloud
Recovery options include
- File and folder recovery
- Virtual disk export with all major hypervisor disk formats supported
- Bare Metal Restore (BMR) to disparate hardware

How does it work?

x360Recover (formerly Replibit) Direct-to-Cloud requires an Axcient-hosted cloud vault in order to set up Direct-to-Cloud backups. In phase 1, we do not support Direct-to-Cloud backups to self-hosted private cloud. Any x360Recover partner with an Axcient hosted Scale-Out Cloud vault may deploy agents supporting Direct-to-Cloud backup.

Once your Axcient-hosted vault has been updated to version 10.4.0 or later, along with agent version 2.26 or newer, it may be enabled for Direct-to-Cloud.

Customized agents are deployed from the vault and are pre-configured to support Direct-to-Cloud backups for a specific customer. The agent software has been enhanced to include identity management and authentication features, enabling it to operate securely in the multi-tenant environment of the vault.

How to deploy Direct-to-Cloud agent
How to recover Direct-to-Cloud endpoints including bare metal recovery (BMR)
Parallel deployment
Bandwidth requirements
Firewall ports

How to deploy Direct-to-Cloud agents

Direct-to-Cloud (D2C) Installation Guide

Installation tips

IMPORTANT: The Direct-to-Cloud agent installation file is valid for 14 days from the time of download. Installing from an agent installer file more than 14 days old will fail with invalid token errors in the log file.
The Direct-to-Cloud agent cannot currently be installed over an existing Replibit agent. If the protected system has a previous installation of the Replibit agent, prior to installing a Direct-to-Cloud agent, the previous agent must be uninstalled and the Replibit agent folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\Replibit) must be deleted. Failure to remove the previous agent files will prevent the Direct-to-Cloud agent from registering with the vault.

To function in Direct-to-Cloud mode, the agent needs to be installed in a special fashion.

Existing users

To simplify agent deployment in Direct-to-Cloud mode, customized agent installer packages are provided specifically for each of your customer accounts.

1. Login to the Cloud vault and navigate to the Users page on the left menu.

2. Locate the client you wish to install Direct-to-Cloud agents for and click the Download agent link provided for that customer.

Note: Users on the vault Users page correspond to existing customer user accounts in the License Portal.

New users

To deploy Direct-to-Cloud agents to a new customer, you must first log in to the License Portal and create a user account for that customer When creating a new customer user account in the License Portal, you'll need to specify at least one location. However, Direct-to-Cloud protected systems are not associated with any location and, instead, belong simply to the customer account.

After creating a new user account in the License Portal, you can access it immediately by navigating to the System Settings -> Licensing page on the vault. Click Sync to update the vault with the new account(s).

Tokens embedded in the downloaded file name

The agent files downloaded from the Users page contain temporary token and identity information embedded in the provided filename. Do not rename the file when saving, as the specified filename is crucial to configuring the agent installation for Direct-to-Cloud mode.

When deploying Direct-to-Cloud agents, a single downloaded file can be used for installation on multiple endpoints for the same customer, but the embedded token information expires after a few hours. Installation of the agent for additional endpoints later for this customer will require that you download a fresh copy of the installer.

Important: Direct-to-Cloud agent installers are specific to the customer. You must download a dedicated agent installation package for the customer each time you wish to deploy new agents.

Enhanced vault usability

To provide a friendlier user experience, the vault has been enhanced with unlocked recovery features which were previously hidden to the admin user.

With 10.4.0 and newer, the admin user now has direct access to all menu options, including File Browser and the snapshot actions on the Protected System Details page.
You no longer need to log in separately as the customer to perform vault recovery operations and can access everything as the admin user.

Schedules are available on the vault.
Direct-to-Cloud protected systems will display the Schedule dropdown selection on the Protected Systems page.

Schedule Now and Run Analysis Tool actions are also supported from the Protected System details page.

How to recover Direct-to-Cloud endpoints

For recovery of Direct-to-Cloud endpoints, you have all the options you would normally expect when recovering from the Cloud:

Virtualize the system in the Axcient Cloud
Download a virtual disk image of the protected system in various formats compatible with all major Hypervisor platforms
Mount a recovery point to perform file and folder recovery using the file browser on the vault

Bare metal recovery

To recover back to a physical device, the x360Recovery Bare Metal Recovery wizard has been enhanced to enable using a virtual disk image as the recovery source.

Download or request a USB shipment of the Virtual Disk export file from the vault.
Boot the replacement hardware device from our Recovery ISO.
Attach either (a) the USB containing the image to the machine, or (b) mount a remote NAS share containing the file.

The Recovery Wizard will then step you through selecting the disk file image(s) and mapping them to local volumes for recovery.

Parallel deployment

The agent has been optimized as much as possible to coexist with other backup solutions during the initial full backup phase of the deployment.

Note that although the agent is optimized to operate in low memory and low CPU environments, high resource utilization may occur if multiple backup solutions are scheduled to run concurrently. We recommend adjusting scheduling for multiple solutions so that simultaneous backups do not occur.

In most cases, you may continue to operate your existing backup solution while the new Direct-to-Cloud agent captures and transmits the initial full backup to the Cloud vault. Once the full backup is completed and incremental backups are occurring regularly, you may then remove the legacy backup solution from the endpoint and retain the data for historical purposes.

Bandwidth requirements

The agent has been optimized to perform in an Internet / WAN environment but the minimum bandwidth requirements for any given situation will vary, depending on your specific circumstances and expectations.

Backup consistency has been tested in environments from 1Mbps to 1Gbps to ensure reliable communications across a broad spectrum of service levels. Generally, the ultimate determining factor for most partners is the time required to complete the initial full backup. This will vary widely, based upon the total amount of data being sent and the available uplink bandwidth.

Refer to the following table for a rough estimate of initial backup completion time for various amounts of data at different upload speeds:

	10GB	50GB	100GB	500GB	1TB	2TB	10TB	20 TB
1Mbps	23.9 Hours	5 Days	10 Days	-	-	-	-	-
3Mbps	8 Hours	1.6 Days	3.3 Days	16.5 Days	-	-	-	-
5Mbps	4.75 Hours	1 Day	2 Days	10 Days	20 Days	-	-	-
10Mbps	2.4 Hours	12 Hours	1 Day	5 Days	10 Days	20 Days	-	-
20Mbps	1.2 Hours	6 Hours	12 Hours	2.5 Days	5 Days	10 Days	49 Days	-
50Mbps	28 Min	2.4 Hours	4.75 Hours	1 Day	2 Days	4 Days	20 Days	40 Days
100Mbps	14 Min	1.2 Hours	2.4 Hours	12 Hours	1 Day	2 Days	10 Days	20 Days
300Mbps	5 Min	24 Min	47 Min	4 Hours	8 Hours	16 Hours	3.5 Days	6.6 Days
500Mbps	3 Min	14 Min	28 Min	2.4 Hours	4.75 Hours	9.5 Hours	2 Days	4 Days
1000Mbps	1.5 Min	7 Min	14 Min	1.2 Hours	2.4 Hours	4.75 Hours	1 day	2 Days

Firewall ports

Direct-to-Cloud agents require several ports to be open for outbound internet connections between the protected system and the Cloud vault:

	TCP 443 (Https/TLS)
	TCP 9079 (Thrift/TLS - Endpoint Manager)
	TCP 9082 (Thrift/TLS – Cloudserver)
	TCP 9090 (Thrift/TLS – Backup Manager)

Note: On Axcient-hosted vaults with Scale-Out Cloud, the Cloudserver service is located directly on a storage node in our datacenter. Storage nodes are assigned dynamically, at the time of protected system registration.

If you must secure outbound traffic explicitly for protected systems, you can locate the assigned storage node URL in aristos.log for each protected endpoint.

Important: Storage node locations within our datacenter are subject to change without notification.

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x360Recover - Direct-to-Cloud (D2C)

Features available in Direct-to-Cloud (D2C)

How does it work?