Acronis, a company that I have watched for a long time, is launching a backup software targeting small to medium businesses (SMB.)
Here’s what Acronis has to say about their announcement
Acronis ®, a leading provider of easy-to-use backup, recovery and security solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, is announcing today Acronis Backup & Recovery® 10 Online . This online backup and recovery solution offers the advantages of a secondary redundant data store without a substantial upfront investment.
The product is one of two Acronis cloud computing-based offerings that will be shown for the first time at the Acronis booth #1125 at VMworld in San Francisco August 30 – September 2.
Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online answers the need for cost effective online redundant data storage for backup and recovery. IT administrators can use it to recover files, folders or complete systems.
While on-site local backup software like Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 provides the benefits of high performance backups and recoveries in the event of specific infrastructure failure, the new Acronis solution enables IT organizations to recover quickly and completely from a secure cloud computing environment in the wake of a full data center disaster or outage, without building a dedicated and redundant offsite storage facility. It includes support for mixed virtual and physical computing environments found in many of today’s businesses.
With this product announcement, the Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 family becomes one of the first data protection solutions to offer agent-less backup for virtual machines (eliminating agents reduces repetitive administration tasks). Moreover, it:
- has minimal impact on management overhead, since the same Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 management console allows for control of both online and local backups—for both physical and virtual machines.
- recovers individual files or whole system images so organizations have the disaster recovery flexibility they need.
- provides flexible retention periods depending on customer’s backup and archiving policies.
- protects backup data through AES-256 data encryption and user authentication.
- offers an initial seeding option for customers with large amounts of data, where the backup is placed on a hard drive and sent to our data center for uploading. Similarly, in the event of a large server outage, Acronis will load a server’s backups onto an external hard drive and ship it to the customer as part of its Large Scale Recovery option.
Snapshot analysis
Smaller organizations often do not have a technical staff and rely upon the help of resellers, solution providers and service providers. This, unfortunately, means that they don’t have an effective backup strategy nor do they have a data retention policy. So, they could find themselves in big trouble if something goes wrong.
Acronis has focused on making backup easy to understand and cost effective. This offering appears to do the same. The key difference is their packaged software offerings assumed the SMB had provisioned their IT infrastructure for an effective backup strategy. This approach allows organizations to us a pay-as-you-go approach.
