Acronis Looks To SMBs With Updated Backup Tool

Acronis has updated its data protection tool with the  general availability of its Backup & Recovery 11 platform, geared towards the disaster recovery and data protection needs of small to medium-size businesses.

Backup & Recovery 11 is available at $1,399 (£864) per server from Acronis channel partners, the company said.

Support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Microsoft SQL Server will be available at a later date.

Cloud And Physical

Built upon Acronis’ disk imaging technology, the business product family offers small businesses a solution for integrated disaster recovery and data protection in one package. Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 offers a data-centric and a system-centric view of physical and virtual machines as well as secure offsite storage. The company said this allows IT managers to simplify their operations from one unified platform, saving costs in the process.

“Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 is a step ahead when it comes to integrated backup, disaster recovery and data protection,” said Sven Dreyfeldt of Siemens IT solutions and services division. “Combining these in one platform and one solution opens new ways to implement policies and disaster recovery strategies across our organisation.”

New features include a system-centric approach to restore all data, files, applications and operating systems through disk imaging technology for faster restoration and a data-centric approach allowing IT managers to recover, manage and search for individual files from a backup no matter where they’re located in the backup file archive.

Additional features include the ability to back up both physical and virtual environments and the capability to store files and full system images in the cloud.

Other Features

The platform also supports an unlimited number of migrations to and from the host machine, and users can place an agent into the virtual machine and manage it as a user would manage a physical machine. In addition, businesses can use a single host-based agent for VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V to manage all virtual machines on a host at once.

“File-level backup and recovery on its own is an incomplete strategy when it comes to meeting today’s stringent recovery time objectives (RTOs) for complete system recovery,” said Lauren Whitehouse, senior analyst at IT research firm Enterprise Strategy Group. “Solidifying solutions for bare metal recovery and file-level protection together makes sense in order to allow for more complete and robust disaster recovery and data protection strategies for small to medium-sized businesses.”