Acronis Joins Forces With LenovoEMC On Small Business Backup

Add Acronis to the list of partners that have signed on to help expand the capabilities of the px line of network attached storage (NAS) devices from LenovoEMC (formerly Iomega), a joint venture between Chinese PC maker Lenovo and the data storage giant.

Powered by Intel processors, the portfolio of rack-mount and standalone desktop NAS systems can pull double duty. In addition to serving as a place to park files on a network, a NAS can store and process video surveillance footage or protect files with McAfee ViruScan Enterprise software, for example.

Automated data protection

As of now, LenovoEMC NAS systems can learn a new trick: automated data protection for small business IT environments.

According to Marc Tanguay, global senior product manager for network storage solutions at LenovoEMC, partnering with backup software provider Acronis, is in keeping with his company’s tradition of working “with brand name, top-tier application providers and ISVs”.

This also is in line with LenovoEMC’s history of bringing additional software-based functionality to NAS devices. By leveraging existing hardware, customers avoid “additional hardware costs, which could be a couple thousand dollars or more”, Tanguay said.

Available as an add-on application for LenovoEMC Series NAS hardware, Acronis Backup and Recovery offers incremental backup of data stored on the NAS to another target on the network. It employs “block technology to send data,” resulting in fast and efficient data backup operations that outperform “open source utilities that are really meant to be more [geared toward] file and folder copy”, Tanguay told Small Business Computing.

Safety net

Installing Acronis’ True Image Lite 2013 on up to three Windows PCs allows for continual backup to a LenovoEMC NAS. Finally, the package can serve as a safety net for servers when matched with Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5 for Windows and Linux Servers. The software helps businesses preserve and recover full images of a server, including the operating system, applications and data.

According to the company, small businesses can enjoy the data protection perks that bigger organisations enjoy, including snapshot capabilities via volume shadow services (VSS) support, RAID and EMC Avamar data deduplication, which are standard.

LenovoEMC President Eric Arcese said that “a cost-effective data backup and protection solution with advanced capabilities” is a major business imperative.

“Our new Lenovo EMC px Acronis Backup Appliance seamlessly combines leading-edge hardware with innovative backup software in a single high-performance solution that doesn’t need or require any additional hardware or third-party software,” Arcese said.

Resilience

In addition, the new software integration makes robust and resilient backup strategies attainable for small businesses, suggested Dmitri Joukovski, senior vice president of product management at Acronis.

“Single-destination backup is a major pain point for businesses of all sizes,” said Joukovski before claiming that “it can be especially detrimental to the livelihood of SMBs.”

“The Acronis-LenovoEMC solution makes hybrid backup destinations accessible and easy to manage, and provides a ‘Plan B’ approach to data protection by leveraging the cloud and other forms of off-site storage,” said Joukovski.

Acronis Backup & Recovery for LenovoEMC NAS is priced at $49 (£31) and can be bundled with Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5 for Windows and Linux Servers for $249. Both are available for download.

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Originally published on eWeek.