Acronis vmProtect 7 offers disaster recovery to VMware vSphere users

Acronis recently launched vmProtect 7, a backup and disaster recovery product that targets the VMware vSphere environment that is being managed by vCenter. This product simply fits right into that environment and makes it easy to backup complete virtual server images.

What Acronis has to say about vmProtect 7

Acronis, a leading provider of disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, today announced Acronis®vmProtect™ 7, introducing new management options, VM replication and support for Exchange, to improve and accelerate backup and disaster recovery practices for VMware®vSphere™ servers.

In addition to its intuitive web-based interface, Acronis vmProtect 7 now integrates seamlessly with VMware® vCenter™, allowing administrators to use one console to manage all their tasks. It now offers advanced replication capability with failover and failback, and the ability to run a virtual machine directly from its backup, dramatically improving the times to recover. Even in the event of total server failure, bare metal recovery (BMR) allows an entire machine to be recovered to dissimilar hardware, significantly reducing downtime. With support for Microsoft® Exchange objects, Acronis vmProtect 7 eliminates the need to create a separate Microsoft® Exchange backup when searching for a specific email or lost contact.

With the adoption of virtual servers continuing to accelerate beyond the enterprise into small businesses at a predicted growth rate of 21 percent1, the automated Disaster Recovery Plan provides an easy to use step-by-step guide for anyone to confidently and quickly recover a machine, even remotely, following a system failure.

Snapshot analysis

Many studies have indicated that organizations do not have an effective backup and disaster recovery plan for their virtual systems. This isn't surprising since many of the same organizations don't have an effective, well-tested plan for their physical industry standard systems either.

vmProtect 7's ability to backup virtual servers even though they have moved from their original host system, the ability to recover individual files, directors, or Exchange directories demonstrates that Acronis has been working with VMWare to create tools that directly address typical customer requirements.

For some time, Acronis has focused on making backup and recovery easy for mid-market companies. As virtual machine software found its way into these organizations, Acronis developed ways to backup virtual servers regardless of whether the virtual machine software was VMware's ESX Server, Citrix's XenServer, KVM or Microsoft's Hyper-V.

Acronis, however, faces stiff competition from a number of suppliers. The market niche that it has selected is the midmarket. vmProtect 7 is designed to be a very easy-to-use backup and disaster recovery tool that isn't as complex as competitive products. This makes its products quite attractive for the target market.

Other suppliers are offering their enterprise backup products in smaller configurations. These products are often very comprehensive and, of course, very complex. Acrois would point out that features IT administrators don't understand won't get used. This could negatively impact disaster recovery procedures.

If your organization has selected VMware's virtualization environment, it would be wise to evaluate Acronis' products.