Engineering and resources giant BHP Billiton has implemented hundreds of software backup systems on its server infrastructure that paves the way for data deduplication.
Acronis general manager for Australia and New Zealand Bill Taylor-Mountford said BHP Billiton has deployed “many hundreds of server licenses” of its backup product at different sites around the country.
Colloquially known as “the Big Australian” BHP Billiton is one of the world's largest mining companies and has operations internationally.
Speaking at the launch of Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 (ABR 10) Taylor-Mountford said 45 companies in the top 500 in Australia are using Acronis for data backups and in some cases they have replaced incumbent vendors.
“In other cases it was older technology that required a refresh. St Vincents Hospital also has a big enterprise deployment,” Taylor-Mountford said, adding other Acronis customers include large enterprises like VicRoads and Honeywell.
Acrons is talking up integrated data deduplication as a selling point for ABR 10 and existing Acronis TruImage Echo customers get an free upgrade to the new version.
“We want to capture as much of the backup market as possible, from home to enterprise users,” Taylor-Mountford said.
National sales manager Simon Howe said ABR 10 has improved support for virtualisation technology such that no agent is required for guest operating systems.
ABR 10 supports virtual environments from VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xensource and Parallels.
“There is file-level and block-level deduplication which can be either source or target based,” Howe said, adding the deduplication technology can reduce storage requirements by up to 90 percent.
For BHP Billiton this means the Acronis upgrade path will provide it with data deduplication technology by default.
ABR 10 is available from Acronis resellers in Australia and New Zealand from $129 for the stand-alone workstation edition up to AU$1649 for the advanced server version, including centralised management. The licensing is per machine.
The new release will replace the TruImage product and is available for Windows and Linux servers.
With deduplication and universal restore, ABR 10 pricing ranges from $179 per workstation up to $2199 per server, including one year of support.