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media@acronis.com.hk Original article on Let's Talk Computers website
Listen to Acronis, Inc.'s July 1st, 2006 interview using:
Acronis True Image 9.1 Enterprise Server
Complete Transcript of Stephen Lawton — Acronis Interview on Let's Talk Computers July 1st 2006"Why having the right back up strategy is so important to your business or corporation"? Alan: When you're the administrator of a medium to large sized business, one of the key responsibilities is making sure that all the computers data is backed up. Our guest today, is Stephen Lawton, Director of Marketing with Acronis. And welcome to LET'S TALK COMPUTERS, Stephen. Stephen: Thanks for having me back. Alan: The last time you were on the air, we talked about Acronis Workstation, and how you need to back up all of our workstations. But, if we have 100 machines, backing them 1 machine at a time — there's got to be a more efficient way of doing that, isn't there? Stephen: That would take you forever. What you need is to be able to manage each of your machines from a central location, put an agent out on the machine, schedule the backup, so the Administrator can run all the backups, literally without touching the machines out there. Alan: The biggest problem that we have with backups is 1) Did we do them? 2) When did we do them? 3) Were they successful? And that's where a central console is just mandatory, because without that central console, you really don't know what happened and when it happened. Stephen: The reporting capabilities are critical. To be able to know as you say, what happened, when it happened? And more importantly, what did not happen and what systems are connected to what did not get backed up. Alan: Well, you have a Corporate Edition of your Version 9.1, Acronis True Image and this is so important for Admin. Administrators, they spend so much of their time either one, backing up or two, restoring what got messed up because some user hit the wrong button at the wrong time. Stephen: It's considered somewhat of a standard in the Industry, I'm not quite sure who came up with this number, but something like 70% of all lost data was lost by the user within the past 60 days of its creation. So, you need a way of getting to your current data very, very quickly. That will save you a ton of time. You don't want to have to go and start looking at tapes and you don't want to have to start rummaging through tons of files that you have. You need a nice, simple straightforward way of getting to this week's data, last week's data, last month's, in a nice, managed method (a policy) of images that you keep from week to week. And then, you'd certainly want do archives offsite, do that electronically with images or you can save them to the physical media that's taken offsite. Alan: One of the things gone from today's business is to say that we're going to cut down at 6:00 and we're going to do backups from 6:00 to 8:00 and when the come in the morning is fresh. Businesses don't shut down anymore, do they? Stephen: Employees don't shut down anymore. It's no longer reasonable to schedule backups where you have to stop a machine. You have to be able to create your backups while you're workstation's running — but also, you servers. You just simply cannot bring down a server a server in order to back it up. With all of the Acronis True Image products, ranging everywhere from our consumer Home Edition, to our Enterprise Server, the images are made while the machines are running. Alan: Let's say you have 400/500 gig hard drives and if it's a server, you're going to have multiple of these hard drives. You don't want to back up everything, every time. You only want to back up what changes. Stephen: It would take forever to back up a huge enterprise. Again, get down to policies. What is the corporate policy to back up? Maybe it's doing an incremental backup Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday night then on Thursday you do a differential backup. That's anything that's changed since your last full backup, then you do an incremental again on Friday and Saturday and Sunday, you do a full backup. That's one of the great things about the modern disaster recovery software from Acronis, is that it's very flexible when it comes to scheduling what type of backups you want to do, when do you want to do them, how often do you want to do it during the course of the day? Most applications don't need continuous data protection, (CDP). That's a very expensive approach. Sure, you need it if you're working in a financial institution and you're running thousands of transactions a minute. That would certainly require CDP. But, for the vast majority of the servers out there, as well as the workstation, just doing scheduled backups is more than adequate. Remember again, backup has been around for a very long time. Backup is not new. What's critical today, is the recovery and I think that every IT manager out there will sit there and sigh and say, "Ah, yes, I had a backup and I couldn't recover it". Alan: Well, one of the things that I really like about the Acronis Backup System, is that you use something called the Acronis Secure Zone. Normally, if we back up to a hard drive, that hard drive's going to be online. So, if we get a virus and the virus is going through all of our hard drives and wiping out stuff, it's going to wipe out our backup. But, you hide it, don't you? Stephen: We do, indeed. We can create a hidden partition, a partition that Windows will not see and therefore, a virus won't be able to reach on the hard disk. And it works just as well for a laptop or a server. You can keep a local copy of your image right there on this hidden partition. And this something that's becoming more and more popular. The IT manager will make two images. They'll keep a local image in the Secure Zone and they can make a second image that they store remotely on a backup server. That way, let's say, a file gets deleted accidentally, but let's say you have software installed that goes poorly and your operating system gets "hosed", you can simply reach into this Secure Zone, this hidden partition, and restore either individual files or the image of the entire hard disk. And you're back up and running again in minutes.
Alan: Nowadays, with all this electric e-commerce, where we're taking orders online, if we lose our backups and have to go back to yesterday's data tape or yesterday's backup, we really can't do that anymore. We have to almost get back — 30 minutes, is about the most that most businesses can lose. Stephen: This is where the question becomes, "Do you use a CDP solution, which will literally back up every transaction as it occurs — Continuous Data Protection or do you use a product that schedules the backups, whether it be every 30 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever your company requires." That's the flexibility of the product. Acronis works very well in an environment, where the IT department might have CDP protecting your transaction servers, (the transaction databases) that have to be protected second by second. But, the applications that don't require the second by second backup, maybe it's every half hour, maybe it's every hour, and maybe it's every day. You can use the Acronis True Image, whether it's the Enterprise Server or Network Servers, or the Workstation for Network Workstations and back up those machines at a time that makes sense to the IT Director. Alan: You have the ability now to actually group which machines that we want to back up as a group, because we may have a number of different machines that are set aside for e-commerce, web traffic, or for accounting. You actually allow us to do grouping. Stephen: Grouping in a sense that you're discussing it, is a new and very useful capability. We used to call groups, we would talk about domains and you have one domain in a company for one application, maybe it's for your financial department and you might have a separate domain for sales. Another domain entirely for your manufacturing groups. In the past, you needed to build separate disaster recovery systems for each domain. Not with Acronis. Acronis can cross those domains. Any machine that touch over the network it can image. You can now have either a single or a set of servers that are going out and touching all of the desktops all of the servers in the company. It doesn't matter what domain they're on and save those images off to an image server. Alan: When you're talking about an image server, it really doesn't have to be a server per se, because you work with SAN devices, NAS devices, and things like RAID? Stephen: It can be anything. We support all different types of backup devices. As a matter of fact, we've in the past 30 days, we added Direct Writing to DVD's. For a small company, it may be writing to dual sided DVD, 9 gigabytes might be all they need for their mail server or for their web server. We used to require third party software to do that, now we can do it directly. You just pop the DVD in the same way you would pop a CD in, point to that device, save your image there. Alan: And that's the whole key, is saving your image to something that is portable, because Katrina has taught us that we really don't have a lot of time to say, "Get out of Dodge". If we have it on DVD's we can just basically put them in a brief case and go with it. Stephen: Whether it's DVD's or a USB Attached Removable Disk, we don't care. Again, we're "hardware agnostic", we will save to any media and of course, we will also allow you to save over the Internet. Maybe you have a VPN Connection to a Remote Server somewhere in Iron Mountain. Instead of having a truck come by every night and you load all your tapes into that truck and hope not of the tapes fall off the back, you could electronically send your images to some offsite location. Alan: Talking about backing up. First of all, what kind of server or what type of equipment do we need to have installed in order to use the Enterprise Version? What does it install on? Stephen: The Enterprise Version of Acronis True Image will install on any Wintel machine that's running one of the Microsoft Windows Server Operating Systems. It could be Windows Server 2000, it could be 2003. It's one of the primary distinctions between Server product and the Workstation product. The Workstation product will only run on desktop operating systems. Also, the product that's called Acronis True Image Server, not Enterprise Server. The distinction here is that the product that's just called Server is for standalone servers. If you have an SMB and maybe you only have four or five servers in your company and you don't necessarily require the capabilities of a Management Console and you're not worried about going out and managing hundreds or thousands of servers. You can save quite a bit of money, simply by buying standalone copies of Acronis True Image, they're not designed to work over a network, but you can still schedule your backups and do everything you can with the Enterprise product. The difference is that you'll save roughly 30%. Alan: And so Workstation Edition, you basically can back up multiple workstations, but you need a license per each workstation. And the Server Edition works exactly the same, except that it backs up servers, right? Stephen: That's correct. We used to call it Corporate Workstation, now we just simply just call it Workstation. You automatically will get the Management Console with each copy of Workstation that you purchase. So, if you're going to be backing up say, 100 networked desktops, you would need to buy 100 copies of the software, but all you need to do is put just the agent out on 99 of those desktops. And then you can manage everything from one management console. With the Enterprise Server Edition, it works exactly the same way. You put an agent out on each of the network servers and you can manage them from a single management console. The console in fact can manage both servers and workstations. And the console can be virtually anything. It could be a laptop, it could be a desktop, and it could be a server. It really doesn't matter. And then, of course, we have the Standalone Server product, which is called Acronis True Image Server for Windows or Linux and that will manage a single standalone server. Alan: What type of computers can we back up, because in a medium to a large sized, even some small sized businesses, who knows what kind of computers they have? They may have laptops, they may have desktops, they may just have anything and everything? Stephen: And that's what we do. We back up anything and everything. The only requirement for the Windows machine is that they have either an AMD or an Intel processor, they're running some version of Windows, and we can image them. With Linux, we support virtually every Linux distribution out there. I've yet to find one that we don't support. Alan: So, if I have a laptop that's running Windows 98 2nd Edition and I bring it into the corporation, as soon as I plug it in, and it's scheduled it for backup, if I've got an agent on that machine, it's going to back it up? Stephen: Absolutely. We support every version of Windows, starting with Windows 98, all the way to the current versions. Alan: Well, what are we looking at far as the cost of getting started with the True Image Server to start off with and then what are we looking at as far as the Enterprise? Stephen: The suggested list price for the Standalone Acronis True Image Server for either Linux or Windows is $699. For the Enterprise Server it's $999. The only option that we offer is the Universal Restore Option and I strongly recommend that that is something that everybody needs for server products. That's an additional $299. For an Enterprise Server with all the "bells and whistles", you're looking at roughly $1,200. Alan: Well, today we covered "Why having the right back up strategy is so important to your business or corporation?" and we just touched a little bit on the Restore, which I think is probably more important than the Backup, especially when you're trying to restore to different types of hardware. We want to have you back on LET'S TALK COMPUTERS, talking about your fantastic restore capabilities built into the Acronis 9.1 series and we look forward to having you talking to you then. Stephen: Thanks so much for having me and I look forward to coming back again.
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