Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 ($1,399/Server)

Acronis, Inc. announced Backup & Recovery 11.

  * Available in future releases

This new product will help organizations simplify their disaster recovery and data protection needs across physical, virtual and cloud environments by providing its established disk imaging technology fully integrated with purpose built data protection and backup features such as catalog and search.

In a market where disaster recovery and data protection are traditionally provided in two separate solutions, Acronis announces a product that provides the two elements of file-based backup and system-level recovery in a single product. This allows organizations to reduce complexity, as well as software maintenance and management costs. Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 is an integrated solution for the backup and recovery of images, files and Virtual Machines (VM). Support for applications such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server will become available later.

"For most companies controlling, backing up and protecting data is still not an easy task. Technology can be complex, installation painful and implementing a full disaster recovery plan is a daunting task for many," explains David Russell, Research Vice President at Gartner. "Many businesses are seeking an easy-to-use and easy-to-manage technology that solves all their needs in one solution."

Recent research shows that the average company is using two or three solutions for its disaster recovery and data protection needs. Available later this quarter, the unified Platform of Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 will provide a data centric view independent of the backup archive, allowing users to control their data wherever it is held, be that in a physical, virtual or a cloud world.

"Running separate solutions can drive up costs and integration between technologies, even from the same vendor, is difficult. Add migrations to the backing up of data across physical, virtual and cloud environments and it’s clear that IT managers today are relying on overly complex legacy technologies," explains Jason Donahue, CEO at Acronis. "Through this new integrated platform, we expect business to benefit from simplified data protection and management as well as the flexibility to choose what they need when they need it."

Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 features will 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 virtual machines for VMware ESX(i) and Microsoft Hyper-V – allowing 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.
• Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Online for Workstation – storage space is doubled to a maximum of 500GB
• Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Online for Server – storage space is increased by 50% to 1.5TB
• Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Online for Virtual Machines – doubled to 4TB

Pricing and availability:
Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 will be available at $1,399 per server from Acronis channel partners worldwide. The solution will be available later in Q2 with support for Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SQL Server becoming available at a later date.