Acronis presentation at CPLUG
Tonight’s CPLUG meeting was a little different that the usual format. A few reps from Acronis came down from Massachusetts to give a talk on their backup and data recovery solutions.
The presentation was good, and I was glad I attended. Their software seems to be well polished and looks like it would be easy to use, especially in an enterprise environment with a mix Windows workstations and Linux servers. It also appeared to handle virtual machine (e.g. VMWare) backups without a problem. All in all, looked pretty decent. And, all things considered, the price was very reasonable.
That said, being a LUG meeting and not just a sales meeting, I had hoped for something a little different…
I would have really liked to have learned more about the technical details on their product and why they designed it the way they did. Sure, we all know how backup systems work… what are the cool parts of this one?
And a better description of what makes it different than the countless other backup solutions out there would have been nice. The software certainly seems to work, but I’m left asking why I would choose Acronis over some other package. And their tehnical rep’s difficultly in addressing any sort of security/encryption related questions didn’t exactly inspire confidence. But, as they said, it does support protocols such as SFTP that would help alleviate most basic concerns.
I guess I was just hoping for a talk more in the style of the BitLeap one from the CPLUG meeting back in January. It wasn’t a “sales pitch” at all really, just a technical discussion of what makes their software cool. And in many ways, that was far more pursuasive than the typical ROI/TCO pitch. It is, after all, a room full of Dilberts rather than of PHBs.
Acronis was kind enough to pay for the night’s pizza, hand out some free pens and t-shirts, and held a raffle for copies of their Home edition. That was very cool of them, and much appreciated. And, I actually won a copy of Acronis True Image 9.0! Heh.
Although, I still expect that rsync will be the basis of my upcoming backup system…
Related:
- Acronis (corporate website)
- Wikipedia – Acronis
- User comments: here, here, and here