The Axcient Cloud now supports Scale-Out Cloud for all Axcient-hosted x360Recover Cloud vaults. 

All vaults using legacy storage have been completely migrated to the new Scale-Out Cloud storage infrastructure and all partners may now take advantage of the enhanced performance and features provided. 

What is Scale-Out Cloud?

Scale-Out Cloud is a totally new architecture for sending, storing, and retrieving data in the Axcient Cloud.  Protected system data has been completely separated from the Cloud vault and now resides directly on a cluster of distributed storage servers within each of our data centers.  Every protected system is stored independently somewhere within the storage cluster and all data is distributed evenly throughout the many physical storage nodes in the cloud.

How does it work?

The Cloud Vault is now simply a partner management user interface and API access point that your x360Recover appliances communicate with for coordinating data replication to the Cloud. 

• When an appliance registers a new protected system for Cloud replication, the vault creates a database record for the device and requests a new storage object from the Scale-Out Cloud. 
• When the appliance is ready to perform replication to the Cloud, it starts a transaction with the vault, requesting to begin data transmission. 
• The vault replies with specific URL of the storage server the given protected system resides in and its storage object ID. 
• The appliance then performs the data transfer directly onto the storage server, bypassing the vault entirely. 

Multiple protected systems on a single appliance likely reside on totally different physical storage nodes distributed within our data center.

What does Scale-Out Cloud do for me?

The primary benefits of Scale-Out Cloud are performance and scalability. 

Performance

Compared to our legacy storage system, the raw storage performance of Scale-Out Cloud is many orders of magnitude higher, with the potential for expansion and growth. 

With legacy vault storage, partners were limited by the constraints of storage, networking, and CPU resources of a single host computer.  This enforced an upper limit to the maximum number of protected systems and total storage capacity that a single vault could efficiently handle.  As a result, many partners had to deploy and manage multiple Cloud vaults to accommodate all their protected systems as their business grew over time.  Overloading of Cloud vaults would occur, leading to replication lag as they struggled to commit data to storage.

Scalability

Scale-Out Cloud distributes the heavily resource-intensive parts of cloud storage across physical storage nodes that can be expanded to scale. 

Partners with many Cloud vaults are now able to consolidate all their protected systems onto a single vault.  A single Scale-Out Cloud vault supports a number of protected systems.  This simplifies replication configuration management and reduces operating costs and complexity by eliminating multiple vaults that no longer need to be managed and maintained.

Scale-Out Cloud features and benefits

Storage and endpoint capacity

Scale-Out Cloud provides storage expansion capability and allows for endpoints to be stored and managed by a single Cloud vault

Superior performance

The distributed architecture of Scale-Out Cloud allows for limitless storage performance across an ever-expanding storage cluster, eliminating replication lag issues caused by data center storage bottlenecks.

Instant virtualization

Scale-Out Cloud interoperates with our Continuity Cloud architecture to provide for instant virtualization of your protected systems in our Disaster Recovery Cloud.  With the click of a button, your protected systems can be exported to iSCSI targets, providing virtual disks that are instantly available to your Cloud Continuity hypervisor.  Protected systems can be immediately booted as a virtual machine in the Cloud.

Reduced total-cost-of-ownership (TCO)

By eliminating the need to maintain multiple Cloud vaults, Scale-Out Cloud reduces total cost of ownership.  Partners now need only a single vault, simplifying replication configuration and eliminating the maintenance of many unnecessary devices. 

Related information

• Scale-Out Cloud instant virtualization with Axcient Continuity Cloud
• How to consolidate vaults in the Axcient Scale-Out Cloud