Acronis receives Parallels-o-gram, reveals cloudy backup platform

Acronis' integration with sibling company Parallels is gathering pace, after the former today announced a cloud storage service.

Both Acronis and Parallels were founded by Serguei Beloussov, who back in September told The Reg he planned a backup-as-a-service product that would meld technology from the two companies.

That product now seems to have landed and earned the name “Acronis Storage”.

Acronis' Australian managing director Andy Purvis confirmed it is indeed the mutant offspring of Acronis' backup products and Parallels' service-provider-grade virtualisation kit. The result is an offering that happily shuttles data from a customer's premises into a service provider's cloud, where it can live on a dedicated array or endure dispersion across disks housed in servers. Parallels' virtualisation suite can already do that trick for virtual machines and Purvis said the two companies have worked together to do it for data divorced from a VM, too

Organisations with 50 or more terabytes may find themselves on the receiving end of a call from Acronis, as the company has slapped the “software-defined storage” label on the new product and is talking up its abilities as a way to manage data stored in the cloud.

Folks willing to stand up their own cloud, such as service providers, are the main target for the new product and Purvis said Acronis and Parallels are already talking about how they can address the former's customers in that industry. Purvis added that he feels smaller resellers and managed service providers are in line for some loving, as Acronis feels it now offers them an on-ramp to the recurring revenue rapture than comes when clients adopt cloud storage. ®