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Hystax Acura full product specification

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Overview

Hystax replicates IT workloads and migrates from VMware, Hyper-V, Bare Metal, KVM, OpenStack, MS Azure, AWS and Oracle Cloud with an ability to do test migrations/failovers
against isolated environment on a target site without influence on production workloads. All the process happens in real-time and does not require any downtime until a customer is ready to switch to a new platform.

Live Cloud Migration

Hystax Acura provides capabilities of background replication of business applications and
instant launch on a new platform.
There are various reasons for customers to initiate migration process. Usually they can be
classified by:

  1. Decrease TCO of on-premise environment
  2. Get rid of vendor lock-in from cloud platform manufacturer
  3. Combine workloads under one location / cloud
  4. Pursue a path to adopt in-house open-source technologies

Migration flow consists of the following steps:

  • Analyze an infrastructure and identify parts/applications for the migration
  • Start a background replication of IT workloads
  • Create a migration plan
  • Perform a test migration / configure settings / build confidence
  • Perform the final migration and switch to a new platform
migration_stages_Hystax_Acura

Why is Disaster Recovery important

Disasters can be caused by internal (environment failure, application failure, human error) and
external (power outage, environment theft, fire, impact of virus attacks, emergency disaster)
reasons.
About 75% of disasters are caused by hardware failure or human errors.
Average loss within one hour of outage can vary from $160,000 to $2 million.
Some of the biggest disasters during the previous two years were:

  • GitLab downtime due to sysadmin error – 300GB of data were accidently deleted;
  • British Airways outage with a bill that reached £150m and grounded 75,000 of
    passengers;
  • Amazon blamed a human error for the big AWS outage that took down a bunch of large internet sites for several hours.
Challenges of BCDR

Recovery Point and Time Objectives

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – time between replication periods or maximum data size, that
a client is ready to sacrifice in case of disaster.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – time between reaction to the disaster and infrastructure
recovery. Usually, this parameter is analyzed for the case of one-machine recovery.

Please refer to Hystax Acura installation guide for a detailed description of deployment
to a specific cloud.

Hystax Acura Installation Process

Installation requirements

  • AWS, Azure, Alibaba, Google Cloud, Flexible Engine, VMware, Oracle Cloud, or
    Mitaka + version of OpenStack (Red Hat, Canonical, Suse, Mirantis, CentOS and
    Vanilla distributives are supported).
  • AMI or Golden image with Hystax Acura (provided by request).
  • AMI or OpenStack virtual machine with 8 vCPUs, 16GB RAM, 100Gb disk.
  • Resources to create a VM with 2 vCPUs/4GB RAM/20GB disk for Hystax Cloud Agent. Created in each target / failover VPC, project, ESXi host.

Installation steps (OpenStack example)

  1. Deploy a virtual machine from the provided golden image and launch it in the OpenStack cloud.
  2. Open web browser and go to https://<ip_address of the machine>/. You will go to a Hystax Setup Wizard. When you pass all the steps, the installation will be completed, and you will be able start using Hystax Acura.

 

Step 1 – Enter the organization name and new Hystax Admin User credentials into the Setup Wizard. This will be the user account for logging in to Hystax Acura Control Panel and managing the system. If there are any errors, the system will notify you.

Description of deployment Hystax Acura

Step 2 – Fill in your Hystax License key that was supposed to be shared with you in advance as well as the settings for accessing your mail server, which will be used to send notifications from Acura and generate periodic reports.

If you prefer a public SMTP server associated with your email address (gmail, yahoo
etc.), please find its settings online. In case of a private SMTP server, contact your network administrator for further details.

Hystax Acura License key

Step 3 – Fill in all the fields by providing cloud configuration details. Use question
mark icons to get hints on the fields. After you click “Next”, the Setup Wizard will
validate the entered data and notify you in case of an error.

Cloud configuration details Hystax Acura

Step 4 – Installation is complete and you can log in to the system using credentials entered
in the first step.

Please refer to Hystax Acura installation guide for a detailed description of deployment to a
specific cloud.

Supported platforms and hypervisors

Hystax Acura supports replication of the following platforms:

  • VMware (agentless)
  • Hyper-V
  • Amazon Web Services
  • Microsoft Azure
  • Google Cloud Platform
  • KVM
  • Oracle Cloud
  • OpenStack
  • Bare Metal
  • Xen
  • Alibaba

OpenStack, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, GCP, Alibaba, Flexible Engine,
VMware are supported on a target or failover site.

Operating systems compatibility matrix

Source platform Platform / OS version Agent, replication type, distribution
VMware
ESXi/vSphere
ESXi 5.5+ HVRAgent (VMware) external replication OVA VM template
Bare Metal
OpenStack
Azure
AWS
Google Cloud
Oracle Cloud
Virtuozzo
Alibaba
Flexible Engine
KVM
Windows 7 HWRAgent (Windows) internal replication MSI installer
Windows 8
Windows 10
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2012
Windows Server 2012 R2
Windows Server 2016
Windows Server 2019
Debian 7
Ubuntu 14.04 Debian 8 HLRAgent (Linux) internal replication .deb/.rpm packages
Ubuntu 16.04
Ubuntu 18.04
Ubuntu 20.04
CentOS 6.2+ (not supported if GPT is used)
CentOS 7.0+
CentOS 8.0+
RHEL 6.1+
RHEL 7.0+
RHEL 8.0+

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Replication and instant spinning up on target/failover cloud

Hystax Acura consistently replicates any types of supported workloads and stores full and incremental replicas on a target cloud using EBS or cinder volumes.

Windows devices are replicated in an application-consistent state, Linux devices are in a crashconsistent state.

VMware workloads are replicated by external replication agent which is deployed on VMware
as a standalone virtual machine with injected credentials to VMware API for taking snapshots. Customer downloads an OVA template, deploys it to VMware and run the agent from this template.

Hystax Acura supports replication of Windows and Linux machines on any platforms by
installing internal replication agents directly to operating system of replicated bare metal or
virtual machine.

Hystax Acura can start instantly replicated workloads on a target site as soon as full or incremental replicas are completed. Launch a Cloud Site from restore point and Migration/DR Plan selected and test the workloads started on a target / failover cloud.

Data Flow for migration and Disaster Recovery looks like the following way:

Hystax Acura Data Flow for migration and disaster recovery

Hystax Acura Migration Capabilities

Hystax Acura automates the process of live migration from any types of supported workloads to the following cloud platforms: OpenStack, Flexible Engine, Azure, AWS, VMware, Alibaba,
GCP.

Replication happens in a background without stopping any machines and, as soon as full replicas are on a target cloud, the business application can be started with orchestration on a target cloud as a test or final migration.

Test migrations help to configure IT workloads settings (CPU, RAM etc.) and build confidence in a migration process before performing the final migration and switching from one production to another.

Customer can do any number of incremental replicas and run test migrations from any of them.

Final migration happens without any data loss and in a controlled manner with a small predefined maintenance window.

Hystax Acura cloud migration advantages

Migration plan

Migration Plan is a scenario used to recreate IT workloads on a target platform. It consists of instructions about machine, subnet, NAT, VPN, S2S VPN, firewall rules and securitygroups details.

Machine details are replicated from source platform and are generated automatically in a Migration Plan.

Migration Plans support orchestration and dependencies between components of business
applications.

Migration Plan Hystax Acura

Hystax Acura Disaster Recovery capabilities

Hystax Acura supports Active-Passive replication scenario when RPO value of 15+ minutes is set for workloads.

Windows devices are replicated in an application-consistent state, Linux devices are in a crashconsistent state.

Hystax Acura has the following capabilities:

  • Single control plane for all customers or projects – manage all your customers through one console
  • Sophisticated role-based access management and audit – manage user access and assign granular roles to various resources. View and export audit logs
  • Logs collected in one place – logs from all customers are concentrated in one place
  • Full coverage with RESTful API – Hystax Acura is 100% covered with RESTful API. Easy automation and integration with current management systems
  • Low RPO and RTO – best-in-class RPO
    values and instant RTO
  • Flexible reports and event notification – get full resource utilization report and configure all level event notifications
  • Custom PSA Integration – integrate solution with existing PSA systems, automatically create and file tickets
  • Deduplicated storage and configurable retention policies – optimized resource
    utilization by unique deduplication technologies. Flexible snapshot retention
    policies

 

Hystax Acura Disaster Recovery Capabilities

Disaster recovery plan

Disaster Recovery Plans support the same capabilities as Migration Plans. Please refer to the
respective section of this document.

Disaster recovery flow

Disaster Recovery flow usually consists of the following stages:

  • Analyze infrastructure and identify parts / applications for DR protection
  • Start background replication of IT workloads
  • Create Disaster Recovery Plan
  • Perform test failover/configure settings
  • Perform failover in case of disaster

Hystax Acura control plane

Hystax Acura Control Plane is a single pane of glass to manage Migration or Disaster Recovery
solution.

It provides functionality to protect/replicate machines, manage replication settings, create Migration/DR Plans and run Migrations/Failovers.

Hystax Acura Control Plane is divided into standalone modules and can be integrated into existing control planes or rebranded according to customer/partner needs.

Hystax Acura Control Plane

Full RESTful API coverage

Hystax Acura solution is 100% covered with RESTful API and can be integrated into an
automated flow of Migration or Disaster Recovery / self-healing.

Data deduplication and WAN-optimization

Data deduplication means storing data in an efficient format not to store the same objects or pieces of data twice. WAN-optimization stands for optimal network utilization to send only necessary data and not to use full business network channel for any particular function (like Disaster Recovery).

Hystax Acura provides the high-level of data deduplication and WAN-optimization. It is achieved by proprietary technologies of client-side data deduplication and network compression.

Hystax Acura documentation

Contacts

Email: [email protected]
Phone: +16282511280
Address: 1250 Borregas Avenue Sunnyvale, CA 94089

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