Storage policies

In Acronis Cyber Infrastructure, the common unit of data is a volume. When you create a volume, you need to define its redundancy mode, tier, and failure domain. These parameters make up a storage policy defining how redundant a volume must be and where it needs to be located.

To better understand a storage policy, let’s have a look at its main components (tiers, failure domains, and redundancy), for a sample scenario. For example, you have three nodes with a number of storage nodes: fast SSDs and high-capacity HDDs. Node 1 has only SSDs; nodes 2 and 3 have both SSDs and HDDs. You want to export storage space via iSCSI and S3, so you need to define a suitable storage policy for each workload.

• The first parameter, tier, defines a group of disks united by criteria (drive type, as a rule) tailored to a specific storage workload. For this sample scenario, you can group your SSD drives into tier 2, and HDD drives into tier 3. You can assign a disk to a tier when creating a storage cluster or adding nodes to it. Note that only nodes 2 and 3 have HDDs and will be used for tier 3. The first node’s SSDs cannot be used for tier 3.
• The second parameter, failure domain, defines a scope within which a set of storage services can fail in a correlated manner. The default failure domain is host. Each data chunk is copied to different storage nodes, just one copy per node. If a node fails, the data is still accessible from the healthy nodes. A disk can also be a failure domain, though it is only relevant for one-node clusters. As you have three nodes in this scenario, we recommend choosing the host failure domain.
• The third parameter, redundancy, should be configured to fit the available disks and tiers. In our example, you have three nodes: all of them have SSDs on tier 2. So, if you select tier 2 in your storage policy, you can use the three nodes for 1, 2, or 3 replicas. But only two of your nodes have HDDs on tier 3. So, if you select tier 3 in your storage policy, you can only store 1 or 2 replicas on the two nodes. In both cases, you can also use encoding, but in this scenario, let’s stick to replication: 3 replicas for SSDs and 2 replicas for HDDs.

To sum it up, the resulting storage policies are: