Acronis frets over lack of testing of DR systems
And launches True Image Home 2010.
By Tom Jowitt | Techworld | Published: 15:34, 18 September 2009
Acronis has this week launched True Image Home 2010, the latest version of its consumer backup and recovery software. But the storage vendor is also concerned that some organisations may be getting complacent about their disaster recovery (DR) procedures by not testing them enough.
Acronis has made its name in the consumer space with products such as True Image Home, which has also been used inside small and large enterprise clients.
But of late the company has also been growing its corporate software portfolio to include database protection tools and to support virtualised platforms, and it now boasts some 140,000 corporate customers worldwide.
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Indeed, according to David Blackman, general manager for Northern Europe, the uptake of virtualisation and the cloud in corporate enterprises, as well as deduplication issues and the struggle to deal with unstructured and structured data, is proving to be good for business for Acronis.
"The two main selling points for virtualisation centre are cost savings (from server consolidation)," said Blackman. "And secondly it offers less expensive disaster recovery capabilities," he added.
But Blackman is concerned because he feels that the majority of small to medium businesses do not have a proper disaster recovery plan in operation.
He pointed to a recent survey of storage managers that showed that 87 percent of storage managers with DR were confident or highly confident that their DR processes would allow them to restore the data for their business critical applications. But only half of those 87 percent test their DR strategies more than once a year.
"The IDC survey points to faults in DR systems if people are only testing them once a year," he said. "It is an awareness issue. Customers need to look at their critical operations and imagine what would happen if it went down. I think they would be horrified."
Acronis True Image Home 2010 costs £39.95 ($65). Optional online backup (with 25GB of storage) is available at £3.95 per month, additional increments of 5GB storage are available at £0.69 per month. Users get 2GB of storage for free for 90 days.
