CA ARCserve D2D “Dominates” Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery

CA Technologies announced that CA ARCserve D2D r15, its new disk-based backup product, significantly outperformed the newest version of Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery in a competitive review. CA ARCserve D2D posted higher grades in every testing category – including performance, ease of use, deployment, and backup and restore functionality.

The study was commissioned by CA Technologies and conducted by leading independent technology research and product evaluation firm Network Testing Labs (NTL). Declaring CA ARCserve D2D a ‘World Class Award’ winner, the study demonstrated the strength of the product’s unique patent-pending I2 (Infinite Incremental) Technology, which drastically reduces storage space, network traffic and load on production servers. Unlike Symantec, CA ARCserve D2D requires a full backup to be performed just once, with only incremental changes applied thereafter.

The study found that backup and recovery times in CA ARCserve D2D are considerably quicker than Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010. For example, during NTL testing, CA ARCserve D2D performed a system copy almost twice as fast as Backup Exec System Recovery (14.8 minutes vs. 25 minutes). Similarly, a CA ARCserve D2D restore operation took less than half the time required by Backup Exec System Recovery (18.2 minutes vs. 39.6 minutes). By moving less data during system backups, CA ARCserve D2D also consumed a fraction of the network bandwidth required by Symantec (14 Mb/sec vs. 51 Mb/sec).

The NTL report also revealed that CA ARCserve D2D backups consumed far less disk space than Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery. After four weeks of simulated backups of multiple servers and clients, CA ARCserve D2D needed less than 14 percent of the space required by Backup Exec System Recovery to store a full backup plus a series of incremental backups (122 GB vs. 890 GB).

"While disk has become more and more viable as a medium for effective data protection, customers must choose carefully when considering disk-based backup and recovery products," said Barry Nance, president of Network Testing Labs, who has evaluated thousands of hardware and software products for publications like Computerworld, BYTE Magazine, Government Computer News, PC Magazine, Network Computing, and Network World. "An outstanding combination of power and efficiency, CA’s ARCserve D2D proved itself the superior data recovery tool in this test, demonstrating it to be considerably more responsive, consume far fewer computing resources and deliver rock-solid reliability."

In addition, the NTL report noted that CA ARCserve D2D’s user interface was "light-years ahead of Symantec’s" and "far easier to understand and navigate." Designed with Web 2.0 principles and features, the CA ARCserve D2D interface improves productivity and collaboration, enabling users to communicate directly with CA Technologies developers.

The study also noted the ability of CA ARCserve D2D to perform bare metal recovery to dissimilar hardware, which provides a fast way to recover a crashed server to hardware that can be the same or different than the original machine. Similar functionality in Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery was reported by NTL to be "slower than ARCserve D2D and much more difficult to use."

"As the volume of data that customers must protect continues to grow, the efficiency and performance of backup operations is becoming more of an issue," said Adam Famularo, general manager of CA Technologies Recovery Management and Data Modeling Customer Solutions Unit. "NTL’s test results demonstrate unequivocally that CA ARCserve D2D r15 offers superior efficiency and performance in disk-based backup environments – saving customers time and money, while allowing them to get greater business value from their existing network and storage infrastructure."