Scale Computing Gains an Acronis Cloud Storage Option for Customers

Scale Computing now offers Acronis cloud storage to customers through an expansion of its OEM partnership agreement. The option also gives channel partners more ways to help their customers combine needed tools to run their businesses.

By incorporating Acronis cloud storage, Scale Computing customers get broader data backup, disaster recovery (DR) and cybersecurity capabilities, according to the companies. Using Scale’s HC3 platform with Acronis, users will gain granular object-level recovery, variable-length deduplication for backup and active ransomware protection. Scale Computing provides edge computing, virtualization and hyperconverged infrastructure products and services. Acronis cloud storage provides hybrid, redundant backup storage for disaster recovery and cybersecurity mitigation. Scale is offering Acronis Cloud Storage in increments ranging from 250GB to 5TB with terms of one to three years.

The deal is an extension of an ongoing relationship the two companies have had for more than a year, Alan Conboy, chief technologist in the office of the CTO at Scale, told Channel Futures.

Scale Computing’s Alan Conboy

“Scale and Acronis have a tight integration, to the point where Scale OEMs Acronis Backup advanced for our virtual platform,” Conboy said. “And Acronis is building agentless backup specifically for our HC3 platform.”

Partners and customers have asked for these expanded services, added Conboy.

“Acronis already has the plumbing built into their backup package to send backups to their own cloud as one of many locations that a customer can back up to,” he said.

Scale customers began asking for Acronis services to be available with Scale’s platform, he said.

“One customer [was] hit with ransomware, which played a major role in their move to Scale Computing and Acronis. They reached out to their partner and asked about adding the built-in Acronis Cloud offering as an additional backup target on top of their local and remote site targets to provide a safe additional layer of backups that isn’t directly on the local network,” he said. “This extra layer of insurance was their motivation to move to Scale Computing and Acronis.”

The broadened OEM deal helps channel partners by providing an easy-to-implement, trusted and tested DR platform to protect customers, said Conboy.

Customer & Analyst Reaction

Jose Solis, senior systems and network engineer for Classic Hotels & Resorts, a Scale customer, said the deal helps customers. The deepened relationship helps partners and resellers offer an all-inclusive platform that will make things easier for customers, he said.

“In the real world, a lot of customers like us are left to deal with implementing both. And it is not an easy task,” he said. “Sometimes vendors are not clear about any compatibility issues or best practices. If both manufacturers are set to be compatible, we understand that all those compatibility issues are left behind and the whole book has been written on how to integrate both from the get-go.”

Pund-IT analyst Charles King said Scale customers get options for robust and secure, cloud-based data backup and recovery.

“Acronis’ experience in detecting and thwarting ransomware and other cyberattacks makes it a potentially valuable strategic partner,” said King. “The deal should benefit both companies and their customers.”

The companies say their combined products can protect virtual machines and provide bare-metal restore capabilities. They also can protect restores on dissimilar hardware or platforms if required. The Acronis cloud storage backups are stored on the Acronis Cyber Infrastructure software-defined compute and storage platform.