Alike v6/A2 Documentation

Welcome to the Alike documentation

Storage Concepts

Storage is fundamental to all backup and DR operations, and it is important to understand how the A2 uses its storage, and what options are available.

Please Note: You must define your backup storage (ADS) in the A2 console before continuing any further. The Alike services will not start without an active ADS.

You Can Configure Two Data Stores

Local Alike Data Store (ADS)

Remote Offsite Data Store (ODS)

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The A2 supports a variety of storage technologies for both the ADS and the ODS. These are as follows:

Supported Storage: ADS

CIFS/SMB: Alike will prompt you for UNC path, username, and password. Domain authentication is supported.

NFS: Alike will prompt you for appropriate credentials.

Local attached disks: This option allows you to use disks locally attached to the A2. You must provision and attach the disk before selecting this option.

GlusterFS: GlusterFS is a distributed filesystem. Alike fully supports GlusterFS as a backup data store.

Supported Storage: ODS

Please see vaulting for more information on ODS storage supported configurations.

Standard (Raw) and Encapsulated (sparse) Deployment

We recommend standard or "raw" data store format. This format is higher performance and more robust in most configurations. This method eliminate the overhead of the encapsulated file format, discussed below, and is very resilient in the face of various forms of disk inconsistency.

Also note: the raw data store will contain millions of small (>1MB) files, so consult your filesystem documentation for optimizing and tuning best practices.

Sparse File Format

Note: Starting in A2 version 6.1, sparse files have been deprecated. Due to issues with scalability of Data Stores configured with sparse format, it is no longer recommended. If you are currently running sparse format, please migrate your data to a raw ADS.

Local Disk Size

The A2 requires enough space on its local disk for various critical operations. Starting in A2 image 1.4, the A2 ships with a 16GB system disk. (Prior to that, it was 8GB). For many customers, this will be sufficient. But for larger environments, this may not be enough.

If you need to expand the size of your local disk, please go to the Advanced menu of the console (6) and then select "A2 System Options (4) and then select "Grow A2 system partition/filesystem (3).

Please see also tuning.