Acronis’ SDI Appliance is the first appearance of the company’s hyper-converged product line. It is a purpose-built backup system intended to be a storage target for its Backup and Backup Cloud offerings.
This software product combines hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) and cyber protection, and is based on updated, pre-configured Acronis Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI) software. This was formerly called Acronis Storage and turns customers’ X86 server-based hardware into a hyper-converged system. It supports block, file, and object storage workloads and delivers cyber protection by incorporating Acronis’ CloudRAID and Notary products. The latter uses blockchain technology.
It addresses five aspects of cyber protection — safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity, and security. Other features include virtualisation, high-availability, AWS S3 compatibility, software-defined networking, and monitoring.
The appliance is delivered pre-installed on hardware that has been developed, built and shipped by German-based RNT RAUSCH GmbH, a manufacturing and logistics company.
It comes in a 3U rack mount form-factor, carrying five nodes, each fitted with an Intel 16-core processor, 32GB RAM (up to 256GB) and 3x Seagate 4/8/10/12 TB SATA disk drives; up to 180TB capacity in total.
Acronis SDI Appliance is currently available in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and North European countries.
Comment
Earliier this month Acronis said it was going to launch a software-defined data centre product. This purpose-designed backup appliance is it.
Add some flash storage and more CPU horsepower to this appliance and it becomes a potential general-purpose hyper-converged system which Acronis has said it’s developing. Virtuozzo, another company part-owned by Acronis co-founder and CEO Serguei Beloussov, has such an HCI system coming that’s destined for service providers selling virtual private clouds.
Blocks & Files wouldn’t be at all surprised if there wasn’t some collaborative software development taking place between Acronis and Virtuozzo.
