Acronis Introduces a Secure Infrastructure Solution for Edge Workloads

As technology evolves, so does the demand for highly available, fault-resistant systems that ensure businesses can keep running no matter what. In fact, the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) market is on pace to grow from $4.1 billion to $17.1 billion by 2023. Foreseeing such demand, Acronis now brings HCI technologies to the cyber protection market, making it even easier for IT pros to build data protection solutions that ensures data is safe, accessible, private, authentic, and secure (SAPAS). Acronis refers to this standard as the Five Vectors of Cyber Protection.

With the introduction of Acronis Software Defined Infrastructure 2.5 (formerly Acronis Storage) and the Acronis SDI Appliance, Acronis builds on its 15-year history as a trusted cyber protection partner (today storing over 200PB of user’s data in Acronis-operated data centers) to meet the needs of customers with varying and evolving needs. That is, given increased computing and data storage on edge devices today, both a universal and scalable software-defined infrastructure (SDI) solution is necessary to meets the rising demand for secure edge solutions. 

“The new Acronis SDI appliance is a pretty robust in terms of data storage and data management," said Phil Goodwin, IDC Research Director. "The plug-in-play hardware has virtualization and software-defined storage for cyber protection in private or public clouds. We believe it’s the optimal backup destination for Acronis Backup and Acronis Backup Cloud users. Acronis is leveraging its partners’ ecosystem, having served the market for over 15 years and is taking a natural next step by introducing a purpose-built backup appliance.”

Indeed, now MSPs and enterprises have access to a solution that not only enhances HCI with security but also delivers the number one choice for edge and edge-like workloads. Let’s take a closer look at the benefits Acronis offers.

By offering the new Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure, Acronis enables users to quickly and easily transform industry-standard hardware into a protected, enterprise-grade hyper-converged system. Specifically, by combining compute, networking, block, file, and object storage capacity within industry-standard hardware, Acronis makes a reliable universal and scalable SDI solution readily available to MSPs and enterprises – delivering the most efficient option available.  

Customers who leverage the new solution are able to meet IT demands for:

• Cyber protection
• High availability and resiliency
• Superior performance and ease-of-use
• Turnkey solutions with integrated support for virtualization
• Total flexibility and simplified task management

Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure 2.5 can be deployed as a backend for Acronis Backup, Acronis Backup Cloud, Acronis Files Cloud Open-Xchange, vSphere, Hyper V, Microsoft Exchange – or serve as shared storage for general needs like documents, graphics, and video files. Meanwhile, different workloads can be applied to the same cluster for simplified management.

In keeping with Acronis’ security-first reputation, Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure incorporates Acronis CloudRAID and Acronis Notary with blockchain, ensuring data immutability and authenticity to preserve essential data and sensitive documents.

As the basis for many essential data protection tasks, the Acronis SDI Appliance itself crucially eliminates downtime and prevents data loss – no matter what happens. Besides hardware clusters that are built without a single point of failure, Acronis leverages multiple advanced software technologies to eliminate service downtime. Case in point: ReadyKernel technology ensures customers can install critical patches on Linux kernels without having to reboot the system.

Acronis’ new solutions are a well-balanced combination of hardware and software that delivers the high performance required for today’s IT needs. Customers can count on storage that’s five-times faster than Ceph on similar hardware – the result of integrated SSD caching, automatic load balancing, and parallel replication.

For virtualization, Acronis provides highly-tuned drivers for Windows and Linux that deliver first-class VM guest support and the ability to set storage policies and redundancy options for each virtual machine.

Customers today require a fault-tolerant, turnkey solution for their data protection and data center needs, or a single platform that combines universal storage and high-performance virtualization. Delivering a hardware solution that complemented its battle-tested, proven software was a natural next step for Acronis.

Since it comes pre-configured with Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure software, Acronis’ plug-n-play appliance eliminates the need for customers to spend time testing, selecting, and ordering various pieces of hardware and software. Instead, customers get a single, powerful tool to manage complex cyber protection tasks – protecting all data, applications and systems.

The two-in-one Acronis SDI Appliance delivers an easy, efficient and secure solution that lets customers optimize their use of Acronis software and meet their data-center needs.

Easy to install and operate, the compact 3U Acronis SDI Appliance consists of five nodes with total raw space up to 180TB. It’s possible to instantly deploy it as a back-end for cyber protection solutions (e.g. Acronis Backup, Acronis Backup Cloud, Acronis Files Cloud) or other applications. Alternatively, it can serve as a fault-tolerant shared storage for general needs like documents, graphics and video files.

Such a universal approach gives customers the opportunity to run one platform for multiple workloads and build any service in a private or public cloud with S3 object storage, hot or cold data storage, or file storage.

Leveraging engineering and manufacturing resources from RNT Rausch GmbH (a Germany-based company that develops and sells tailor-made server and storage solutions since 1998), Acronis was able to build a protected edge appliance that is fault-tolerant, secure, fast and cost-efficient. Because the chassis is custom-designed with five full-fledge nodes, robust compute power, and offers storage all in one unit, the appliance ensures data safety – even if two servers out of five nodes in a cluster go down.

While Acronis' primary goal in building the Acronis SDI Appliance was to create optimal integration with Acronis Data Cloud's suite of products, the appliance goes even further to meet diverse business needs.

Customers can expect seamless support for many workloads, use-cases, storage types and open standard APIs, plus virtualization and software-defined networks. Such robust functionality means IT pros have access to an efficient, highly available system – one that combines universal storage and high-performance virtualization, while integrating proven hardware and software into one solution.

Meanwhile, minimizing IT workloads with built-in management and monitoring tools remains one of Acronis’ trademark approaches: Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure ensures all systems will run smoothly – and it’s easy to troubleshoot problems before they impact end-users or third-party systems via a single pane of glass.

Given today’s evolving IT landscape, Acronis understands that powerful, turnkey cyber protection solutions are the only effective way for MSPs and enterprises to keep data safe, accessible, private, authentic and secure.

The Acronis SDI Appliance appeals to customers looking for a prepacked, reliable, hybrid-cloud solution that supports edge and edge-like workloads. As an all-in-one solution with affordable pricing, MSPs and enterprises alike have an easy way to control costs. Plus, it works out-of-the-box so users avoid hours spent assembling, testing installing and configuring software.

The standalone Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure 2.5 solution is available worldwide, with the Acronis SDI Appliance currently available to order for customers in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and North European countries.

Learn more or request a quote here.