Hot on the heels of adding support for Microsoft Azure and Office 365 to Acronis Backup Cloud, its core platform for BDR service providers, Acronis International GmbH has rolled out a major new release of its flagship backup solution for end users that’s designed to provide comprehensive protection for the many places businesses store data these days.
Called Acronis Backup 12, the new product protects not only on-premises solutions like Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint but cloud-based platforms like Office 365, Azure, and Amazon EC2 and virtual machines running on VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V, as well as iPads, iPhones, and Android-based mobile devices. According to Acronis, whose U.S. headquarters are in Burlington, Mass., the new system is also the first in the industry to support Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows Server 2016 and its new resilient change tracking data protection technology.
Acronis Backup 12 provides an equally expansive series of options for storing backups, including on-premises hardware, Azure, EC2, and Acronis’s own cloud infrastructure. Users can also restore everything from individual emails and attachments to full system images via bare metal recovery, cloud-based recovery, physical data shipment, and more, according to Acronis vice president of product marketing Frank Jablonski.
“You’ve got the full flexibility to be able to recover or migrate your workloads anywhere you want to,” he says, adding that today’s IT managers need BDR solutions capable of handling a wide range of data sources and targets.
“As an IT person today your environment has changed. You’re not just managing what you’ve got sitting in the closet around the corner,” Jablonski observes. “What we’re offering here with Acronis Backup 12 is the ability to protect all of your business information in all the locations that it resides.”
The new system is not just more comprehensive than its predecessors, moreover, but faster too.
“We’ve been able to increase our backup and recovery performance by over a hundred percent,” Jablonski says.
That, along with features like a newly enhanced “Instant Restore” function that can recover protected workloads to a virtual machine in as little as 15 seconds, result in significant savings, he continues. Acronis estimates that the speedier backup and restore technologies in Acronis Backup 12 will save a 20-person business 857 man hours annually, and cut a larger, 200-employee company’s BDR spending by up to $420,000 a year. That corresponds to a roughly 25-day ROI, Jablonski notes.
The launch of Acronis Backup 12 is the latest milestone in an ambitious release schedule. Next week at the HostingCon event in New Orleans Acronis will build on last week’s cloud-to-cloud rollouts with a major new edition of Acronis Backup Cloud. That will be followed in September by a new edition of the company’s software-defined Acronis Storage solution featuring data authenticity functionality based on the Blockchain technology underlying bitcoin’s radically transparent public transaction ledger.
“We’re going to be able to guarantee that the information that was stored at this date and time is exactly the same information that you’re looking at now,” Jablonski says. Acronis announced an R&D effort aimed at capitalizing on Blockchain back in May.
Further enhancements to Acronis Backup, including new e-discovery and archiving capabilities, are in the works as well, says Jablonski, who declined to specify when those features will reach market.
As reported by ChannelPro previously, Acronis is in the midst of an aggressive recruiting campaign aimed at converting thousands of traditional BDR resellers into providers of cloud-based backup services as well. Back in February, the company said its recruitment goal for 2016 was 3,000 partners, but Jablonski now pegs this year’s target at “over 2,000 service providers,” and says it has a little more than 500 up and running so far.
