About the storage cluster

The storage cluster provides the most efficient usage of the hardware with erasure coding, integrated SSD caching, automatic load balancing, and RDMA/InfiniBand support. The cluster space can be used for:

  • iSCSI block storage (hot data and virtual machines)
  • S3 object storage (protected with Acronis Notary blockchain and with geo-replication between datacenters)
  • File storage (NFS)

In addition, Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure is integrated with Acronis Cyber Protection solutions for storing backups in the cluster, sending them to cloud services (like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and AWS S3), or storing them on NAS via the NFS protocol. Geo-replication is available for Backup Gateways set up on different storage backends: a local storage cluster, NFS share, or public cloud.

Data storage policies can be customized to meet various use cases: each data volume can have a specific redundancy mode, storage tier, and failure domain. Moreover, the data can be encrypted with the AES-256 standard.

Storage cluster architecture

The fundamental component of Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure is a storage cluster, a group of physical servers interconnected by the network. The core storage comprises server disks, which are assigned one or more roles. Typically, each server in the cluster runs core storage services that correspond to the following disk roles:

  • Supplementary roles:

Along with the core storage services, servers run storage access points that allow top-level virtualization and storage services to access the storage cluster.

In addition, a server joined to the storage cluster can run neither metadata nor chunk services. In this case, the node will run only storage access points and serve as a storage cluster client.