In a market in which disaster recovery and data protection are typically provided in separate solutions, you’ve probably found yourself wishing for a comprehensive, easy-to-use solution that would just do both for you. There are a few solutions on the market that promise that kind of functionality, but one of the easier-to-use, more innovative choices is arguably Acronis’s Backup & Recovery, the latest version of which (version 11) brings its functionality into the virtualized and cloud environments.
I just spoke with Izzy Azeri, Acronis’s senior VP and general manager for the Americas, about the new version of Acronis Backup & Recovery, specifically about the product’s deep reach into physical, virtual, and cloud environments. “As the size of data continues to grow, our aim is still to help customers manage their information better,” said Azeri. “We offer an easy-to-use, easy-to-manage technology that solves all their needs in one solution.”
According to Azeri, Backup & Recovery 11 stands apart from the competition thanks to that simplicity and also thanks to what the product backs up. “We’re backing up physical and virtual machines—across six different hypervisors—and we’re backing up to the cloud. We’re backing up to any medium with equal power.” Through the main console, the company offers Acronis Backup & Recover 10 Online. One console seamlessly manages all backup and recovery efforts regardless of the data’s actual location.
Another key feature that differentiates the Acronis solution is its staging capabilities, which let customers make important performance decisions by moving data (with one click) to different media (disk/tape/online, for example) as storage needs for certain data changes over time. Acronis supports five different staging locations.
Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 features include:
For all environments:
- New: Data Protection Capabilities – Catalog & Search
- Improved: Disaster Recovery Plans – step by step plan to make recovery easy
- New: Staging and multi-destination – reduce long term storage costs with staging and add redundancy with multi-destination backups to tape, disk and cloud
- Improved: Support for tape drives and tape libraries
- Improved GUI provides simplified workflows
For physical:
- New: Ability to restore and migrate to dissimilar hardware for Linux environments
- Improved: Better deduplication performance
For virtual:
- New: Simultaneous backups of multiple VMs for VMwareESX(i) and Microsoft Hyper-Vallowing increased performance for backups of virtual environments
- New: Single agent for multiple VMware ESX(i) hosts - increases efficiency and simplifies management of backups for VMware vSphere configurations
- New: LAN free backup - reduced CPU and network consumption
- New: Support for Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) - for Microsoft Hyper-V environments
For the cloud:
- New: Increased capacity options – based on customer demand for storage space, Acronis has increased its online backup capacity. Unlike other solutions, Acronis offers a flat pricing structure for the cloud rather than pricing per gigabyte.
