Drobo and Acronis team up on a backup and recovery platform, while Drobo launches online data protection tutorials with help from VMware, Citrix and others.
Data storage specialist
Drobo is teaming up with Acronis, a provider of disaster recovery and data protection
solutions, to deliver a backup and recovery solution for small and midsize
businesses (SMBs). The joint solution incorporates Drobos business storage
arrays as well as backup and recovery solutions from Acronis.
A recent global threat
awareness survey from Acronis found 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.
Drobo also announced the
development and enhancement of lab-tested and joint-partner solutions in the
form of simple "how-to" guides and online video tutorials created
with industry partners including VMware, Citrix, Amazon Web Services (AWS),
Veeam, Symantec, Acronis, Double-Take, Carbonite, Pogoplug and OCZ. These
resources are designed to address small and midsize business (SMB) storage
solution needs, including virtualization, cloud computing and data protection.
Drobo solutions include the
server virtualization platforms such as VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer for
high-availability applications and OCZ for automated data-aware tiering of
mixed workloads in virtualized environments; disaster recovery such as VMware
Site Recovery Manager for leveraging vSphere replication between dissimilar
storage; Double-Take Availability from Vision Solutions for physical and
virtual server DR failover; and off-site file replication for unstructured data
in smaller organizations leveraging Drobo Sync.
The solution set also
includes cloud storage services from Amazon for leveraging the AWS Storage
Gateway for automatic off-site backup to cloud, Carbonite for off-site cloud
backup and Pogoplug for remote access to files and cloud backup. In the
category of data protection and backup, Drobo offers solutions featuring Veeam
Backup and Replication for protecting VMware and Microsoft virtual
environments, Acronis Backup and Recovery for heterogeneous backup of physical
and virtual servers, and Symantec Backup Exec for extending storage for SMB
backup with deduplication options.
The company said it would continue
its solution development and training in the coming weeks with dedicated
solutions for Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vCloud and others.
For each solution, Drobo develops materials that allow customers and resellers
to design their solution with need-based components, and Drobo also provides
detailed instructions for sizing and implementing the solution in a validated
manner. Each solution includes a 30-minute video tutorial by an expert and a
detailed how-to guide providing step-by-step instructions.
According to recent cloud
usage research conducted by Drobo, 96 percent of SMBs (with up to 500
employees) report they will store at least 50 percent of their data on-site for
a minimum of the next three years. Factors cited included cloud performance,
security and reliability concerns. Both businesses and individuals did state
they want tighter and more automated integration between their on-site data and
their cloud provider.
Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
Email
Print
