Acronis International GmbH, the Swiss data protection vendor with U.S. headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts, today unveiled new editions of its onsite and hybrid cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions.
Acronis Backup 11.7 (for businesses with five to 50 employees and one to five servers) and Advanced Backup 11.7 (for organizations with 50 to 1,000 employees and five to 100 servers) include these core enhancements:
- A new subscription-based licensing option that enables channel pros and their customers to get BDR deployments up and running without upfront capital investments.
- New variable block deduplication functionality that packs 24 times more data than previous editions in the same amount of memory and recovers data 40 percent faster.
- New features for backing up shared network file system (NFS) folders and storing backups in NFS-based repositories
- New support for Microsoft Exchange 2016, Microsoft Windows 10, Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4, VMware vSphere 6, Linux kernel up to version 4.4, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.x.
Both products are available immediately. Joining them in market during the coming month will be Acronis Backup Cloud version 5, the latest release of Acronis’s hybrid cloud backup solution. Notable additions to that systems include:
- Automated service management tools aimed at helping service providers administer consumption, quotas, and alerts more easily.
- Self-serve backup functionality that enables end users to monitor the progress of their backups and initiate backups of protected devices with a single click.
- A new centralized dashboard that lets MSPs view alerts and execute audits through a unified management console.
Acronis emphasizes that all three new products offer a seamless migration path to the company’s forthcoming Acronis Backup 12 offering.
“Our latest Acronis Backup solutions have been pushed to the limit when it comes to testing, performance, and reliability—it’s our most solid backup release ever,” said Acronis chief marketing officer John Zanni in a press statement. “We’ve also responded to customer feedback by making everything easier, including a simplified buying process with subscription pricing and seamless upgrades to new solutions that will keep our partners and end users prepared for whatever future challenges lie ahead.”
In a recent interview with ChannelPro, Zanni stated that Acronis partners can expect to see new and updated solutions like those introduced today more steadily in the future.
“We’re in a model today where you can’t ship new products every three years and maintain a growing business, so you will see constant development,” he said. Acronis Files Cloud, a new file sync and share system that’s currently in beta testing, will formally launch within the next three to six months, he added, with additional services in areas like e-discovery following quickly.
Today’s announcements come scarcely a month after the debut of the Acronis Partner Program for Cloud, an extension of the company’s traditional partner program with tiers, benefits, and resources optimized for the needs of service providers and resellers that offer products in Acronis’s portfolio of cloud-based data protection solutions, which includes both Acronis Backup Cloud and Acronis Files Cloud.
They also come amid an aggressive push by Acronis to expand its partner base significantly. According to Zanni, Acronis plans to grow its partner program from roughly 650 members worldwide today to as many as 3,000 by the close of the calendar year, and to “tens of thousands over the next few years.”
