Scale has seen their initial partnership with Acronis around Acronis Backup to be a major competitive displacement advantage for partners, and are looking to extend that further with the Acronis cloud backup solution.

Edge-focused hyperconverged infrastructure [HCI] vendor Scale Computing has extended its existing partnership with data protection vendor Acronis. The original OEM agreement made in September of last year made the on-prem Acronis Backup solution available to Scale’s channel partners. Now, Scale partners will be able to offer the Acronis Cloud Storage cloud subscription offering.

“Scale has maintained relationships with multiple backup partners from a meet in the channel perspective for several years, but our customers really wanted and deserved something tighter and better,” said Alan Conboy, office of the CTO, Scale Computing. “We looked at almost everyone in the space, but we specifically chose Acronis based on a combination of factors.”

Those factors were both technology and market related.

“First, we really, really felt strongly that their approach to cyber protection inside the workload and their unique ability to stop and unwind active infestations without needing human intervention was very compelling,” Conboy said. “Second, many, many of our customers had already chosen Acronis over several others. Some of our largest existing customers made that choice directly. This was not a decision that we took rapidly, but rather with significant consideration over an extended period of time.”

The decision to originally limit the partnership to Acronis Backup stemmed from the belief that the on-prem version rather than the cloud was what Scale’s customers wanted most.

“Originally, we didn’t think that our customers would really demand yet another cloud option,” Conboy indicated. “The option was already there for folks that wanted to use it. Once in the field, we discovered very rapidly that they were asking for exactly that – a cloud offering that was integrated already, cost-effective and unusually easy to deploy.”

Scale now offers an end-to-end storage and cloud backup solution from Acronis that protects entire virtual machines, provides bare metal restore capabilities, and can restore to dissimilar hardware or platforms if required. Acronis Cloud Storage provides active ransomware protection, and physical security is ensured through multiple protective measures, including security barriers, video surveillance, and highly monitored access. Data can also be encrypted at source with government-approved AES-256 strong encryption before sending it to a secure data center.

“The cyber protection component, which comes free of charge, actively defends against and automatically remediates against things like encrypting malware, crypto mining and other cyber attacks,” Conboy stated. “This has proven to be compelling compared with legacy backup platforms that lack this, or have to partner for some subset of this kind of protection.”

Conboy thinks this will be a strong competitive displacement tool for partners.

“It absolutely is,” he emphasized. “We have replaced wholesale entrenched implementations of almost every other company’s legacy backup implementations in just the last few months.”

For now, the plan is to focus on Acronis as their principal strategic backup partner.

“We are very happy with the success we are having with Acronis, so we are waiting and watching for now,” Conboy said.

Acronis Cloud Storage is available now,  and will be sold by Scale in increments ranging from 250GB to 5TB, and in terms ranging from one year to three years.

“The fact that it is pre-integrated and incredibly easy to consume at a price point that just makes sense for our customer base,” Conboy said.