Acronis Storage to Compete With Amazon

Acronis International GmbH announced the Acronis Storage, a software-defined storage solution for archiving large volumes of data in the cloud.

Multiple users, each with petabytes of data can now stream to this automated, carrier grade, elastic and resilient storage system.

According to IDC, data volumes globally will grow 50 times by the year 2020 to reach 6.6ZBs, and 40% of all data will be stored and processed in the cloud. With Acronis Storage, organisations can meet increasing archiving and backup storage demands with better performance at a lower cost than large cloud providers like Amazon.

“As the lines between hardware, software and the cloud become increasingly blurred, Acronis Storage exploits innovative new software-defined storage capabilities that change the economics,” said Laura DuBois, program VP for IDC’s storage systems, software and solutions research offerings. “The new offering from Acronis enables highly reliable cloud-based backup solutions using much less costly storage infrastructure.”

Co-founder and new Acronis CEO Serguei Beloussov is bringing his knowledge of cloud services gained from more than ten years as the CEO of Parallels.

Enterprises and service providers, such as the thousands using Parallels hosting and automations tools, previously had to provision expensive storage capacity for logging, archiving and backup. With Acronis Storage, organisations can now lower costs while achieving high levels of reliability and scalability. Acronis Storage provides automated redundancy of data to prevent data loss and unplanned system downtime.

“Taking Storage Management and Deployment to the software layer is the only way to create professional, scalable tools to drive a storage as-a-service business,” said Lance Crosby, Esq. CEO at Softlayer Technologies, Inc., an IBM company. “Acronis is well known for their in-depth backup knowledge, so their step towards the software defined storage market for Backup and Archiving makes great sense.”

“Not only has Acronis Storage allowed us to operate a large-scale, robust and flexible cloud backup solution, they have completely changed the cost structure of storage,” said Jan-Jaap Jager, CEO of intergenia, German provider of web hosting solutions. “The solution is totally software-based, creating high-grade storage on commodity hardware. It saves 60% or more capacity overhead for complete data redundancy.”

Acronis Storage optimises:

• Reliability. Traditional storage systems don’t consider broken storage disks or nodes as part of its protection area, resulting in unnoticed disk failures, and ultimately, data inconsistency. Self-healing data management technology ensures that the data remains protected and functional.
• Scalability. Linear scaling in both capacity and number of simultaneous users is critical as organisations attempt to get ahead of user demands. 60% of companies surveyed by Aberdeen Group cite “meeting the increasing demands for storage” as its top IT concern. Acronis Storage technology addresses this problem, while simplifying the complexity of managing increasing loads. It scales to meet the current storage needs of customers, while also providing a flexible, future-proofed storage solution to accommodate growth.
• Efficiency. It is able to utilise a mix of industry standard storage components, and provide through software, the redundancy and configurations to deliver a high-value, high-reliability, scalable storage solution.

“We’re offering an innovative solution based on proven technology for companies that want to run IT as a service,” said Beloussov. “This is a major focus area for us and we will continue to add advanced features. Acronis has been a trusted name in backup and DR for a dozen years. Acronis Storage extends our data management and data protection leadership to new heights.”