September 4, 2013 at 15:06Hello, Russia!
In the computer world, it is customary to start with the mantra “Hello, world!”, But at our own risk we decided to break this act of initiation for good reason. A lot of all kinds of marketing material is written on this very world, and here we decided to tell exclusively to the Russian-speaking audience about the boiling set of technologies from which we collect our products and services.Short story
Acronis was legally registered at the very beginning of 2001, although work on the code had been going on for seven years, that is, by the time the company was registered, the code could already go to school. This code, by the way, is still part of our TrueImage 2014 and Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 products. During this time, he managed to visit our products OS Selector, Migrate Easy, Disk Director and Snap Deploy. The authors of this code, by the way, still work in Acronis, having managed to visit Sergey Belousov, founder and current CEO of Acronis with his code in SWsoft (later merged with Parallels). Loyalty to tradition, however!We are known in the world as the leader of disaster recovery, i.e. disaster recovery. Interestingly, we did not specifically plan this. We just had a good technology for removing and copying disk images, and it was in this niche that it came in handy. Even the True Image brand, associated with Acronis in many home users around the world, appeared by chance. Initially, the product was planned to be called Acronis System Saver, but, fortunately, there was a smart person who was guessing to check how the abbreviation would look.
Today Acronis is:
- 270,000 business customers in a wide range of industries
- Over 5 Million Home User Licenses Sold
- Over 160 OEM Agreements
- 18 offices worldwide
- 30,000 partners in over 90 countries
- Products localized in 14 languages
And all this arose on the basis of code written in the cozy walls of the native Fiztekh by two Russian programmers by the efforts of the maestro to grow startups!
What are we doing
Simply put, we copy data. It sounds trivial, but nothing trivial about it. Vaughn, Windows Explorer for so many years has not learned to adequately evaluate the time remaining until completion when copying. So, not so simple. In general, copying is what continuously happens with data in the world around us. Only the data form and copy mechanisms vary, but the essence remains. A few examples.DNA
DNA only does what it replicates its genetic code from cell to cell. A multicellular organism is a monstrous cluster of DNA backups. By the way, this is why unicellular organisms combined into multicellular organisms - this improved their disaster recovery plan. A plan that allows a person to completely renew all his cells for five years and perfectly remain himself - the bearer of the same genetic code and tuned neural network, which also replicates itself stubbornly.Iliad
Initially, due to the ignorance of the ancient Greeks, the Iliad spread in the oral tradition, as a result of which, by the way, it experienced mutations that we can observe in the modern text - artifacts of the lack of verification of backups. Being created by Homer in the ninth century BC, it went through a gigantic string of copies through the ancient Greek brains before it was recorded on a permanent medium at the end of the fifth century AD.Discus Miron
Strictly speaking, the Discoball of Miron, which has come down to us, does not belong to Miron. One of the many ancient Roman reproductions has come down to us. And the original is lost. Thanks to the Romans for mine pastes and backups! By the way, it turns out that the ancient Romans were the first to make a disk backup. True, together with the disk manager - discus thrower.Ancient Egyptian language
Well, the most egregious example of the benefits of a copy is the ancient Egyptian language. The French Egyptologist Champollion was able to decipher the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs solely because the priests copied their message to Ptolemy V Epiphanes in the ancient Greek language and wrote them nearby on a permanent carrier - Rosetta stone. This is a real backup recovery plan - backup in case all native speakers disappear!Data and Technology
Data was copied and will always be copied; only the form, volume and means of copying them change. If in the Middle Ages copying a book amounted to weeks of work of a scribe, nowadays a whole electronic library can be copied in a matter of minutes.In 2010, the amount of data created around the world amounted to 1 zettabyte - this is about a billion completely filled hard drives with a capacity of 1 TB, which exceeds all the storage space available today. According to EMC's forecast, over the next 10 years, data volumes will increase by another 44 times, creating a storage space deficit of 60%.
This ever-accelerating data stream introduces new requirements and technologies. Deduplication, compression, encryption, snapshots, replication, cloud storage, virtualization, increments - these are just the tip of the iceberg of technologies Acronis is dealing with and which this blog will reveal.
Backup
One of the big areas of data backup these days is the backup market or, more concisely, a backup. Many create backups because they are wise enough by bitter experience or not optimistic enough, others because they are forced by all sorts of legal acts. For example, after the September 11th terrorist attack and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the United States adopted the SAS 70 service audit standard, which obliges organizations to create and store backups outside of their offices. It could not be otherwise. The volume of losses is impressive:- After September 11th, 250 of 450 business holders at the World Trade Center went bankrupt due to data loss. The total loss amounted to 40 billion dollars
- The damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, amounting to $ 100 million a day due to economic inaction of the business, cost the US economy a total of $ 125 billion, 60 of which were paid by insurance companies
Insurance business and backups - from one opera. Miser pays twice!