Cloud and virtualisation key themes for SME backup: Acronis

Izzy Azeri, vice president of business and corporate development at Acronis, reckons SMEs need backup software that can cope with physical and virtual systems, and that can store backups locally or in the cloud.

Doing all this from a single console and one set of policies keeps things simple to administer, while cloud storage means the images can be restored anywhere there is an Internet connection.

Azeri says the close relationship between Acronis and VMware should result in an elegant method for backing up virtual systems in a VMware Cloud Director environment. Acronis is working with VMware to provide a set of APIs for this purpose, and an initial implementation is expected sometime in 2011.

One of the problems with backing up to the cloud is the time and bandwidth required for the initial data transfer, and to recover data in bulk. Acronis gets around this by giving customers the option of carrying out the "initial seeding" by backing up a system onto any appropriate type of disk and sending it to the company. That way, online backups are only incremental.

Although Acronis’ backup software for virtual servers already deduplicates files, that feature is not a part of the workstation or physical server backup products. Azeri explained that the company opted for the more secure approach of encrypting backup files on a per-machine basis, which is incompatible with deduplication.