Over the past few years Acronis has gone from being a supplier of specialist disk imaging tools to full backup and recovery products. Home and business users are both catered for, with its latest Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 (ABR10) family a capable and scalable solution aimed very much at the business buyer.

Several implementations of ABR10 are available to protect not just individual workstations and servers, but virtual machine deployments, with support for all the leading virtualisation platforms including both VMware and Hyper-V. An implementation specifically for use with Windows Small Business server is yet another option, plus Advanced editions for enterprise users which add the ability to remotely manage backup and recovery across multiple systems from a single console.

Installation is painless; at least if you go for one of the standalone products. We, however, tested the Advanced Server package, which took a few hours to deploy as several components need to be configured, including SQL Server to host the management databases involved. On the plus side there are plenty of wizards to help you get started plus, on Windows hosts, the required Acronis agents can be pushed out centrally over the LAN. For Linux, however, we had to create the installation files first, then copy and install them manually.

It can also take a while to get to grips with the way the software works, especially on larger networks with lots of machines to backup. And that despite an easy to navigate management interface, our only gripe here being the use of a separate console purely for licence management.

A wide variety of media can be used for backup, including writeable CD/DVD disks, USB flash drives, and removable hard disks. Backups can also be saved in a hidden disk partition on the local machine (the Acronis Secure Zone) for easy bare-metal recovery without the need to first create special boot disks. Backup to a remote network share is yet another option, although on large distributed networks you're encouraged to configure special data vaults, managed by machines, referred to as Acronis storage nodes.

Storage nodes help offload some of the processing required and make the Acronis software a lot more scalable, with support for up to 20 nodes per network, each looking after up to 20 data vaults. The vaults, in turn, can be held on local drives, network shares or NAS/SAN storage. Locally attached tape libraries can also be employed, although the lack of support for Removable Storage Manager (RSM) means it's not an option on the latest Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 platforms.

Once we'd configured our storage nodes and data vaults we found creating and scheduling backups to be easy. Block-level disk-imaging and file-by-file backups can both be configured with the usual options for full, incremental or differential backups with GFS (Grandfather / Father / Son) or Tower of Hanoi rotation.

Recovery proved equally straightforward with, for simple file restores, support for self-service selection by users, if wanted. Bare metal recovery is, of necessity, more of a specialist job but it's automated and easy to do. Added to which there's an optional Universal Restore module to restore backups to different hardware. This is normally £236 plus VAT per system, but is currently free until the end of June 2010.

You can even convert backups straight to bootable virtual machines, although you need to configure this option in advance when backups are scheduled.

Data deduplication is yet another option (£162 plus VAT per licence), Acronis claiming to be able to reduce backup storage by up to 90 percent when this is employed. We didn't get anywhere near that in our tests - more like 40-50 percent - but it's still worth having, with support for both file and block level deduplication either at source, via the agent, or on the Acronis storage nodes. On the downside, additional software has to be deployed before deduplication can be applied and the processing overheads can be considerable, especially on heavily used shared systems.

Other features of note include the ability to direct backups to two separate locations, encrypt data as it's copied and take full advantage of Microsoft VSS (Volume Shadow Service) on Windows hosts.

All of which makes for an impressive yet easy to manage backup and recovery solution. OK it's not cheap, but then neither is the competition, and if you're in the market for this type of product it's definitely worth a look.

Verdict
Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 is a highly scalable solution capable of protecting both physical and virtual machines running Windows or Linux. Backups can be taken to local or network media with, in the Advanced editions, support for centrally managed data vaults and optional data deduplication either at source or on the remote storage nodes. Deployment can take a while, especially on larger networks, but once configured it's easy to manage and compares well against the more established alternatives.

Company: Acronis

Contact: 0203 176 0340

Tags: backup acronis windows server 2008 r2 microsoft windows server (computing) vmware windows acronis true image