Drobo, Acronis Partner on Storage Solutions for Small Businesses

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 Drobo€™s 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.