Acronis Introduces Virtual Edition for Better Backup/Recovery Protection and Planning in Virtual Environments

February 17, 2009, SINGAPORE - Acronis® (https://www.acronis.com.sg), a provider of affordable, scalable storage management and disaster recovery software, today announced the availability of Acronis True Image Virtual Edition in Asia - a full-functioned, cost-effective and scalable solution for organisations that need to back up, restore or test more than four virtual servers on a single physical server.

Acronis True Image Virtual Edition simplifies software licensing models in virtual environments and delivers more value to organisations without additional costs. Using Acronis True Image Virtual Edition, the more virtual machines users create on a host, the lower the price per virtual machine for enterprise-class disaster recovery protection. There are no limits or additional charges for backing up and restoring new virtual machines. Whether an organisation is backing up five or 500 virtual machines, as long as they all reside on the same physical server, the cost remains the same.

Many competing products charge a licensing fee for each operating system, processor, or virtual server. As a result, it can become extremely expensive for an organisation to build, test, migrate and manage a virtual machine infrastructure.

"Organisations frequently struggle with accurately predicting software costs and successfully auditing licensing compliance for applications running in virtual environments," said Chris Wolf, senior analyst with Burton Group. "Vendors that offer flexible licensing terms which allow organisations to run unlimited virtual instances of an application per physical server instance, or offer the option to license per virtual machine when few application instances are needed, clearly understand the management challenges faced by their end users. Vendors that demonstrate awareness of virtualisation's nuances through both their technology and licensing policies should be strongly considered over those that do not offer comparable solutions."

Edward Lim, General Manager of Acronis Asia said: "Virtualisation will continue to grow in importance and gain wider use in 2009 as IT managers are already deploying multiple virtualisation platforms and the different software required for each. Common sense tells us there's a better way to license software than charging the customer every time they create a new virtual machine. Straightforward pricing based on the number of physical servers is easily understood and can be budgeted and measured, which is exactly what organisations need in this economic downturn. Acronis True Image Virtual Edition delivers leading disk-imaging price/performance to organisations requiring disaster recovery protection in a high volume virtual machine environment."

To further strengthen the presence in the virtualisation space, Acronis has also updated the Acronis True Image product family, which now supports virtual machines and file formats from Citrix XenServer. With the support for every major virtualisation platform, including VMware, Microsoft, Parallels and Citrix/Xen, Acronis is able to provide greater flexibility for IT managers in their virtualisation infrastructure planning.

"The latest updates to the corporate Acronis True Image backup and disaster recovery software are agnostic toward virtualisation technology and allows IT personnel to choose the platforms that make the most sense for their needs, and use Acronis across the board to keep all that data safe," Edward added.

Other features in the latest release also include dual destination and integration with Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange.

Dual destination - Customers can back up a server image to two locations, including remote sites via local disk or network store, or the Acronis Secure ZoneTM.

Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange Integration - backup and recovery software specifically designed for Microsoft Exchange Server - can now access Exchange-specific functions from within the Acronis True Image Echo Management Console.

Acronis True Image Virtual Edition is US$2,599 per physical server including Acronis Universal Restore™. Acronis Universal Restore allows organisations to recover server images to dissimilar virtual hardware, regardless of the operating system or installed components. For more information, please visit https://www.acronis.com.sg/enterprise/products/ATIVE/.

Customers who require disaster recovery protection for less than five virtual machines per physical server can purchase the Acronis True Image standard server edition. All the products are available from Acronis resellers.