Acronis Launches Recovery for Microsoft Exchange

Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange provides a fast, cost-effective and flexible option for mission-critical email servers

Singapore, October 02, 2008 - Acronis® Inc. (http://www.acronis.com.sg), a provider of affordable, scalable storage management and disaster recovery software, today announced the availability of Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange, a backup and recovery software program specifically designed to provide a fast, cost-effective and flexible option to protect Microsoft Exchange servers.

Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange extends the company's proven backup and disaster recovery protection to Microsoft Exchange servers running on the enterprise-class operating system.

Designed primarily with speed and secure backups in mind, Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange gives IT administrators the ability to keep the important lifeblood of any business - e-mail - in perfect working order. The product also has a version for Microsoft Small Business Server to address the needs of SMBs.

"Email has become a mission-critical application for businesses these days. The longer an email server is down, the bigger the disaster is to a business. Being able to get the Exchange server up and running and recover emails in minutes, instead of hours or days, is one of the most challenging tasks facing most organsiations in Singapore today, especially SMEs who have limited IT resources," said Edward Lim, General Manager of Acronis Asia. "Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange speeds up recovery of Exchange servers and messages to mininise the loss of productivity. In addition, it allows users to backup and restore between different versions of Microsoft Exchange."

Flexibility=Fast Recovery

Not all failures are created equal. That means that the restoration procedure for a particular problem in an Exchange database will vary depending on what caused the problem. With Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange, IT administrators can:

• Recover specific email messages or mailboxes using a granular (brick-level) restore
• Restore to the point of failure, which means not having to completely re-install Exchange
• Recover to a specific point in time, to a last known working state

Restorations are faster and the backup files are smaller due to Acronis' ability to back up and restore individual emails, files, folders and mailboxes and not the entire Exchange application.

In the event of a hardware failure, customers can use the software in conjunction with Acronis True Image Echo backup software with Universal Restore to do a bare-metal restore to a completely different piece of hardware and have the Exchange Server back in service very quickly.

Alain Gentilhomme, Vice President of Product Management of Acronis, said, "There is one common thread that unites every business in the world - small or large - and that is the need for emails to work all the time. A company that cannot communicate with its partners and customers on time won't be in business for very long. All of our software products are built for fast recovery, but Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange acknowledges the importance of emails in any company and has features that are specifically designed to make restoring an Exchange server fast and painless."

"We see an increasing focus on not only recovery of user data but also system level recovery of the server configuration, system state and application," said Laura DuBois, Research Director of Storage Software at IDC. "Acronis enables recovery of both. The Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange product offers not only granular recovery of individual messages but also priority-based recovery of the Exchange service itself. For some environments, near instant recovery of the messaging service is essential to ongoing business operations while recovery of older message data can occur over a rolling window."

Features of Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange include:

• Active Restore: Full Microsoft Exchange Server functionality for users in seconds, while the system is still being restored
• Near continuous data protection: Continuously back up transactions to enable the complete restoration of Microsoft Exchange Server databases with minimum data loss
• Automatic dial-tone recovery: Restore e-mail service more quickly to users (providing them with a basic "dial tone") and then restore users' previous data as it becomes available
• Hot Backup: Backup while the Microsoft Exchange service is online and serving clients, allowing for 24/7 availability
• Restore email from database-level backup
• The Backup Strategy Assistant: Create a disaster recovery plan for any environment, delivering step-by-step instructions for recovery. Following the wizard's instruction, anyone can schedule backup jobs and restore a system rapidly, be they an experienced database administrator or not
• Centralized management: Provides a single point for the entire infrastructure, making it easy to manage and track backup and recovery activities
• Intuitive, wizard-driven GUI and command-line interface: Guides users through the scheduling process and reduces the possibility for errors; also offers full command-line interface for scripting
• High performance and speeds: Due to the ability to restore data (mailboxes, public folders or individual emails) from a database-level backup, rather than time-consuming brick-level backups
• Bare-metal restore: Restore a whole production server (operating system and all databases, configuration files, and data) on an unconfigured system from a bootable CD or by PXE
• Windows Server 2008 support

Availability and pricing

Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange is now available from Acronis resellers worldwide and online from the Acronis website (http://www.acronis.com.sg). Manufacturer's suggested list price starts at US$999 per server. Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange for MS Small Business Server lists for US$399.