Acronis, a leading provider of easy-to-use backup, recovery and security solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, is announcing today Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online. This online backup and recovery solution offers the advantages of a secondary redundant data store without a substantial upfront investment. 

The product is one of two Acronis cloud computing-based offerings that will be shown for the first time at the Acronis booth #1125 at VMworld in San Francisco August 30 – September 2.

Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online answers the need for cost effective online redundant data storage for backup and recovery. IT administrators can use it to recover files, folders or complete systems.

While on-site local backup software like Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 provides the benefits of high performance backups and recoveries in the event of specific infrastructure failure, the new Acronis solution enables IT organizations to recover quickly and completely from a secure cloud computing environment in the wake of a full data center disaster or outage, without building a dedicated and redundant offsite storage facility. It includes support for mixed virtual and physical computing environments found in many of today’s businesses.

With this product announcement, the Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 family becomes one of the first data protection solutions to offer agent-less backup for virtual machines (eliminating agents reduces repetitive administration tasks). Moreover, it:

• has minimal impact on management overhead, since the same Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 management console allows for control of both online and local backups—for both physical and virtual machines.
• recovers individual files or whole system images so organizations have the disaster recovery flexibility they need.
• provides flexible retention periods depending on customer’s backup and archiving policies.
• protects backup data through AES-256 data encryption and user authentication.
• offers an initial seeding option for customers with large amounts of data, where the backup is placed on a hard drive and sent to our data center for uploading. Similarly, in the event of a large server outage, Acronis will load a server’s backups onto an external hard drive and ship it to the customer as part of its Large Scale Recovery option.

“Small- to mid-sized organizations are eager to adopt recovery solutions that will provide them with greater availability and flexibility on their journey across physical, virtual and cloud environments,” says Dave Russell, Vice President, Storage Technologies and Strategies, Gartner Inc.

“Best practices for disaster recovery typically involve having multiple layers of protection with both local and offsite redundant backups,” explains Jason Donahue, CEO at Acronis. “Unfortunately, some organizations don’t have redundant data storage across multiple sites. Our new online offering, coupled with Acronis Backup & Recovery 10, gives organizations of all sizes the best of both worlds by combining high interval, high-performance local backups with the added protection of offsite redundant backups.”

Pricing and availability

The service is available in an annual subscription basis and is licensed per machine:

Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online for Workstation    250GB              $    49.99

Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online for Server                 1TB             $  499.00

Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online for Virtual Machines  2TB             $1199.00          

The service will be available for a free 60-day evaluation starting September 6, 2010 and will be generally available in North America in early Q4, 2010. General availability in other worldwide regions will be following later this year.  Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online will be available through your local channel partner. For more information, please visit: http://www.acronis.com/backup-recovery/online/.