Quantity of servers

One of the strongest features of Acronis Cyber Infrastructure is scalability. The bigger the cluster, the better Acronis Cyber Infrastructure performs.

To achieve the best performance, keep at least 20 percent of the cluster capacity free.

One server (evaluation scenario)

Even though three nodes are recommended for the minimum configuration, you can start evaluating Acronis Cyber Infrastructure with just one node and add more nodes later. If you only want to use the Backup Gateway, you can deploy a very basic installation on a single virtual or physical node. Although in this case, you may need to provide data redundancy by other means or risk losing user data.

At the very least, a storage cluster must have one metadata service and one chunk service running. However, such a configuration will have two key limitations:

Just one MDS will be a single point of failure. If it fails, the entire cluster will stop working.
Just one CS will be able to store just one chunk replica. If it fails, the data will be lost.

You can use a single-node installation for backup storage with the NFS share or public cloud destination.

Three servers (minimum for high availability)

Three servers are required to test all of the product features, and this is the minimum number for a production environment.

The minimum configuration ensures that the cluster can survive the failure of one node without data loss. The minimum cluster configuration must have at least three metadata services running. SSD/NVMe disks can be assigned the system, metadata, and cache roles at the same time, freeing up more disks for the storage role.

Five and more servers (recommended for high availability and optimal TCO)

At least five nodes are required to ensure that the cluster can survive failure of two nodes without data loss. For improved resilience, performance, and fault tolerance it is recommended to create production clusters from at least ten nodes.

The recommended cluster configuration must have five metadata services running.