Drobo And Acronis To Provide Optimized Data Protection Solutions

SAN JOSE, Calif. - March 29, 2012 - Drobo, maker of the award-winning data storage products for businesses and professionals, today announced that it has partnered with Acronis, a leading provider of disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, to deliver an optimized backup and recovery solution for businesses with limited resources that are embracing virtualization. The joint solution, comprising Drobo's business storage arrays as well as backup and recovery solutions from Acronis, provides customers with a comprehensive data-protection solution intended to cover all their environments.

Drobo business products are currently the storage of choice for over 25,000 business customers and are known for being uniquely automated, application-driven and affordable. In a recent independent survey, Drobo business customers estimated that they save over 200 hours (25 work days) per year and $12,000 in costs by choosing Drobo over comparable storage from Dell, HP or EMC.

A recent survey from Acronis¹ revealed that businesses are struggling to maintain adequate backup and recovery provisions as their environments evolve and expand. More than half of survey respondents admitted to not backing up their virtual data as often as their data on physical machines, and nearly 60 percent are using separate solutions for their virtual and physical environments. The combined solution from Acronis and Drobo is designed to help ease the IT management burden and accelerate data recovery following an unexpected failure.

"Businesses want a choice when it comes to how and where they back up their data, even if they lack the in-house expertise to manage complex systems," said George Crump, principle and lead analyst of Storage-Switzerland. "The Drobo and Acronis solution provides intuitive backup and recovery capability, with off-site and on-site replication security, in an easy to deploy and manage package."

"Acronis and Drobo already share a mutual customer base - hundreds of businesses have successfully deployed our solutions together. This release highlights commitments by both companies to make our technologies even easier to manage together," said Tom Buiocchi, CEO of Drobo. "We see a rise in virtual server adoption in even the smallest of customers, with many using both physical and virtual machines. Acronis' solutions offer protection that covers our customers' heterogeneous environments whether they are physical, virtual, cloud or any combination of the three."

Acronis products are currently used by over 175,000 businesses across a broad range of industries worldwide. The recently released Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 introduces significant enhancements compared to Acronis® vmProtect™ 6, including VM replication and Microsoft® Exchange Recovery.

"For some administrators, providing adequate backup and recovery across their evolving environments is still regarded as too costly and complex, but it doesn't have to be," commented Laurent Dedenis, president and general manager, sales and marketing, at Acronis. "This combination of easy-to-manage technologies offers an enterprise best-practice approach to staging offsite and onsite data storage, replication and data protection to an organization of any size."

Webinar
Acronis and Drobo will conduct a webinar to present this new solution to customers and partners:
Time: 9AM PDT
Date: Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Registration link: http://info.drobo.com/webinar/acronis_expert

For more information about the combined solution, please visit www.drobo.com/acronis.

¹ Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index, 2012.

Drobo makes award-winning data storage products for small and medium businesses and individual professionals that provide an unprecedented combination of sophisticated data protection and management features, affordable capacity, and ease-of-use. Based on the patented and proven BeyondRAID™ technology, Drobo's ability to deliver "Big Storage in a Small Box" creates the best storage experience ever for hundreds of thousands of small and medium businesses and individual professionals worldwide, who use it to support their file backup and media archiving, server virtualization and email application needs. To learn more, visit www.drobo.com or follow us on Twitter @drobo.