Acronis Targets SMBs with vmProtect7

Acronis knows that no admin ever got fired for buying software that beefs up backup and recovery capabilities for vSphere, so the company unveiled Acronis vmProtect 7, which improves on v6 by offering new management options, VM replication and support for Exchange. V7 also integrates with vCenter, another wise move that gives admins the proverbial one pane of glass from which to conduct business.

Acronis vmProtect 7 -- which is a free upgrade for v6 users who bought the product with maintenance -- offers advanced replication capability with failover and failback, along with the ability to run a VM directly from its backup, significantly improving recovery times.

According to Acronis, "Even in the event of total failure, bare metal recovery allows an entire machine to be recovered to dissimilar hardware, significantly reducing downtime. With support for Microsoft Exchange objects, Acronis vmProtect7 eliminates the need to create a separate Microsoft Exchange backup when searching for a specific e-mail or lost contact."

Acronis vmProtect 7 also includes an SMB-centric capability that protects smaller companies from losing access to their DR plans if the one person who is responsible for them is unavailable. This capability enables these smaller companies to print the necessary documentation and run the DR process.

Saying that Acronis is now protecting some 200,000 servers worldwide and has migrated over a million servers from P2V, Seth Goodling, Acronis Virtualization Practice Manager, cites the growth of SMB users who are currently on v6, and likely to avail themselves of v7. "Enterprise virtualization has been rolling downhill pretty fast toward SMBs," he notes, adding, "SMBs are really accelerating virtualization."

Acronis vmProtect 7 retains its v6 price tag of $499 per CPU.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/06/2012 at 12:48 PM