Logo
Submit a request
Storm season is back, bringing with it the potential for significant weather events. If you have clients in areas prone to infrastructure disruption, visit the Disaster Recovery Resources guide for preparedness information. Datto recommends performing proactive disaster recovery testing to mitigate potential downtime. See our articles about the importance of disaster recovery testing and Preparing For A Cloud Virtualization Test: Policies, Procedures, And Partner Responsibilities to learn more. For live updates, follow @datto on Twitter.

Setting Up A New Datto Appliance

Brittany Schlenk
Last Updated:
Follow

Topic

This article describes the process to deploy and configure a new Datto appliance.

For preventative measures and maintenance best practices for Datto appliances, see the Datto Device Care & Maintenance Guide.

Environment

  • Datto SIRIS
  • Datto ALTO
  • Datto NAS

Prerequisites

The Datto Solution requires a physical or virtual Datto device to back up directly to the cloud.
Datto appliances require Internet access to perform their first backup.
  • If you are installing a Datto appliance at a new location, make sure that host network meets the Datto Networking Requirements.
  • The first backup for a protected system can be very large. If you are pairing protected systems with your Datto appliance for the first time, and are not performing a Device Migration, you should consider ordering a RoundTrip drive. Many times, host networks do not have enough throughput to replicate initial backups to the Datto cloud in a timely manner.
  • When setting up a new Datto appliance, you should have the power cable and Ethernet cable.
    • While not required, Datto recommends having a monitor, mouse, and keyboard ready to plug into the appliance in case you have trouble registering it over the LAN.

Initial Appliance Setup

SIRIS 3 Enterprise devices ship with their array drives removed. The array drives are commonly packed in a separate box. Before powering on the device, install the array drives. See this article for further information.

1. Plug the appliance into a power outlet. Datto also recommends connecting the backup appliance to a battery backup (also known as an 'Uninterruptible Power Supply' or 'UPS') to ensure consistent operation during low voltage and brownout conditions.

2. Connect the appliance to your LAN. Depending on the type of device, there can be two or more wired network interface cards (NIC) located on the back of the device. You can use any of the NICs, but you cannot hot-swap them. If you need to change the NIC, you will either need to reboot the device to apply the changes, or you change eth0 to DHCP or assign the IP address, move the cable and reload networking. 

Datto also strongly recommends enabling IPMI on appliances which include this feature, and configuring the IPMI port with a static IPv4 address. This will allow you to remotely access the device for troubleshooting if necessary. See this article for more information about configuring IPMI.

The following steps assume that DHCP service is enabled on your network. If not, you will need to connect a keyboard, monitor, and mouse directly to the device to assign an IP address to the main interface before it can be seen on the network or device.dattobackup.com.

3. Turn on the power to the appliance.

For smaller devices, boot time should not take longer than five minutes. For larger devices, such as AltoXL 6000 and up, as well as Datto NAS 6000 and up, a cold boot may take more than five minutes. This is normal device functionality. In the event that your device does not finish booting for the first time within ten minutes, contact Datto Technical Support for assistance.

4. From another computer on the same LAN as the Datto appliance, open a browser, and go to device.dattobackup.com.

If you only have one Datto appliance on this LAN, this URL will bring you to the web interface for that Datto. If you have more than one Datto appliance on this LAN, you will see a list of devices.

Unregistered devices are listed as backupDevice. Click on its IP address to connect to it.

After you connect to the Datto appliance, it will download and apply device updates. If any updates fail to install, contact Datto Technical Support for assistance.

Once the updating process completes, your browser should redirect you to a Device Registration screen. Follow the Registering a Datto Appliance article to get started.

Add Protected Systems 

After registering the Datto appliance, follow the Protect A System Wizard article to pair protected machines for backup to the Datto appliance.

Joining the Datto Appliance to a Domain

Datto appliances work best when they are not domain-joined. However, if your environment requires it, you can join the device to your domain from the Network Settings page of the appliance GUI.

Configure Offsite Synchronization 

If you need to regulate a Datto device's bandwidth when syncing with the cloud, consult the Off-Site Synchronization Configuration guide to learn how to calculate daily synchronization transfer amounts and set bandwidth throttles.

Additional Resources

Was this article helpful?

5 out of 6 found this helpful

You must sign in before voting on this article.

Calling all Partners! We want to hear your feedback! Please participate in this quick survey and help us build a better, more-relevant Knowledge Base!

Want to talk about it? Head on over to our Community Forum!

Related articles