Acronis extends granular recovery of applications to physical and virtual environments with SQL and SharePoint support

With more organisations moving large critical databases to virtual environments, Acronis has announced that it is adding support for Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint to its award-winning Acronis Backup & Recovery Unified Platform for virtual and physical environments. The new modules are the latest extension of the Acronis platform to support the most popular data-intensive applications, reducing the complexity and time taken to restore applications and their critical data in every environment.

The patent-pending Single Pass Backup combines two backups in one, eliminating the need for separate application protection strategies and reducing the operation time required. By leveraging Acronis' deep understanding of storage and file systems, the new modules are 'application aware' when both backing up and restoring, making it possible to find and restore only the files or objects required from the application, in seconds. This is a particular advantage when working in a virtual environment as traditional backup and recovery solutions must restore an entire VM before an individual file or object can be found.

"Two of the unintended consequences of greater production server virtualisation are the increase in complexity and greater demand for the availability of critical data," commented Peter French, Technical Director at Synapsys, Acronis distributor in SA and Africa. "The real focus for maintaining protection and availability of critical applications should be on ease of restore. Whether it is a single e-mail, a single file or an entire database, these can now be quickly located and recovered through a one-step, one-administrator process without the need for specialised tools or knowledge."

The technology offers increased flexibility that can enable organisations to achieve the aggressive RPO and RTO measures demanded for applications - even those on virtual machines. The Single Pass Backup and one-process restore enables instances and databases, as well as individual files and folders, to be restored. Acronis Backup & Recovery supports Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Citrix XenServer and Parallels Server BareMetal hypervisors, and physical Windows and Linux servers, which allows data to be moved securely and seamlessly between any environment of choice. This enables the fast recovery of any machine or file to any other available machine, for which reproducing an identical configuration and environment is not required.

By adding Microsoft SharePoint and SQL Server to its existing support for Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange, Acronis is simplifying the complexity of data protection and availability for applications in every environment.

The company also announced that its flagship Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 Advanced Platform now supports Microsoft Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8.