9.1. Understanding NFS storage¶

Acronis Cyber Infrastructure allows you to organize nodes into a highly available NFS cluster in which you can create NFS shares. In Acronis Cyber Infrastructure terms, an NFS share is an access point for a volume and as such it can be assigned an IP address or DNS name. The volume, in turn, can be assigned the usual properties: redundancy type, tier, and failure domain. In each share you can create multiple NFS exports that are actual exported directories for user data. Each export has, among other properties, a path that, combined with share’s IP address, uniquely identifies the export on the network and allows you to mount it by using standard commands.

On the technical side, NFS volumes are based on object storage. Aside from offering high availability and scalability, object storage eliminates the limit on the amount of files and the size of data you can keep in the NFS cluster. Each share is perfect for keeping billions of files of any size. However, such scalability implies IO overhead that is wasted on file size changes and rewrites. For this reason, an NFS cluster makes a perfect cold and warm file storage but is not recommended for hot and high performance, or often rewritten data (like running virtual machines). Integration of Acronis Cyber Infrastructure with solutions from VMware, for example, is best done via iSCSI to achieve better performance.