57 Copyright © Acronis, Inc., 2000-20102.14.1 Basic conceptsApplying backup policies and tracking their executionTo protect data on a single machine, you install on the machine an agent (p. 398) or multiple agentsfor various data types you want to protect. You connect the console to the machine and create abackup plan (p. 399) or multiple backup plans.What if you have to manage hundreds of machines? It takes time to create a backup plan on eachmachine, while the plans may be quite similar – you need to back up, say, the system drive and theusers' documents. Tracking the plans' execution on each machine separately is also time-consuming.To be able to propagate the management operations to multiple machines, you install AcronisBackup & Recovery 10 Management Server (p. 407) and register (p. 408) the machines on the server.After that you can create groups of machines and thus manage multiple machines as a whole. Youcan protect all of them or your selection by setting up a common backup plan, which is called abackup policy (p. 399).Once you apply the policy to a group of machines, the management server deploys the policy to eachof the machines. On each machine the agents find the items to back up and create correspondingcentralized backup plans (p. 401). You will be able to monitor the policies’ statuses on a single screenand navigate, if required, to each machine, plan or task to see their status and log entries. Themanagement server also enables you to monitor and manage the agent's locally originated activities.Since you connect the console to the management server rather than to each machine and performall management operations through the central management unit, this way of management is calledcentralized management (p. 401).Centralized management does not rule out the direct management (p. 402) of each machine. You canconnect the console to each machine and perform any direct management operation. However,centralized backup plans can be managed through the management server only, since a well-thoughtout policy functions automatically and rarely requires human intervention.Using the management server, you can create one or more centralized archive storages (centralizedvaults (p. 401)), which will be shared by the registered machines. A centralized vault can be used byany backup policy as well as by any backup plan created on the registered machines using directmanagement.Organizing a managed archive storageWhat should the capacity of your centralized vault be? What if transferring sizeable backups to thevault will cause network congestion? Does backup of an online production server affect the serverperformance? To ensure that the centralized backup will not slow down business processes in yourcompany and to minimize the resources required for the data protection, you install Acronis Backup& Recovery 10 Storage Node (p. 408) and configure it to manage a centralized vault or multiplecentralized vaults. Such vaults are called managed vaults (p. 406).The storage node helps the agent deduplicate (p. 402) backups before transferring them to managedvaults and deduplicates the backups already saved in the vaults. Deduplication results in reducingbackup traffic and saving storage space. The storage node also undertakes operations with archives(such as validation and cleanup), which otherwise are performed by the agent, and thus relieves themanaged machines from unnecessary computing load. Last but not least, Acronis Backup & Recovery10 Storage Node enables using a tape library as a centralized vault for storing backup archives.
