CA ARCserve D2D r15 Wins Vs. Acronis Backup & Recovery 10

CA Technologies announced that CA ARCserve D2D r15, its new high-speed disk-based backup product, outperformed Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 in a competitive review in every key category – including functionality, performance, and ease of use.

The study, conducted by Network Testing Labs (NTL) and commissioned by CA Technologies, follows a similar study in which CA ARCserve D2D r15 outperformed the newest version of Symantec Backup Exec in every testing category.

Both studies underscore the value of CA ARCserve D2D’s patent-pending I2 (Infinite Incremental) Technology, which only requires a single initial full backup, thereby reducing storage space requirements, network traffic and production server load.

According to Barry Nance, president of Network Testing Labs, "ARCserve D2D gave us faster performance, frugal use of computing resources, better data management, a responsive, more intuitive user interface and advanced technology. In particular, CA Technologies Infinite Incrementals technology gave us full backups as of any point in time without consuming the disk space that a full backup normally would. Moreover, in contrast to Acronis’ Backup & Recovery GUI, ARCserve D2D’s Web 2.0 interface is quick, light and responsive."

The study found that backup and recovery times are significantly quicker with CA ARCserve D2D than with Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 – even with Acronis’ optional deduplication activated. During testing, CA ARCserve D 2D performed a system copy 20percent faster than Acronis Backup & Recovery (14.8 minutes vs. 18.4 minutes). Similarly, CA ARCserve D2D preformed restore operations quicker than Acronis Backup & Recovery (18.4 minutes vs. 26 minutes).  

According to the study, CA ARCserve D2D backups required a fraction of the disk space consumed by Acronis Backup & Recovery. At the end of a one-month period of simulated backups of multiple servers and clients, CA ARCserve D2D needed less than 35 percent of the space required by Acronis Backup & Recovery (with deduplication) to store a full backup plus a series of incremental backups (122 GB vs. 378 GB).

Without the Acronis deduplication option – which must be licensed and installed separately – the performance and storage requirement differences are even more dramatic. CA ARCserve D2D performed a system copy 30percent faster and a system restore nearly 50percent faster than Acronis Backup & Recovery without deduplication. And, without deduplication, CA ARCserve D2D required 90 percent less disk space for backup data than Acronis Backup & Recovery.

The study also found that CA ARCserve D2D "was far easier to use, far more intuitive to navigate and far more responsive" than Acronis Backup & Recovery. 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.

NTL also noted the "miraculous" ability of CA ARCserve D2D to perform bare metal recovery to dissimilar hardware, which facilitates the quick recovery of a crashed server to a server with significantly different hardware.  

"Organizations of all kinds have a relentlessly growing volume of data that they need to protect, even though they also continue to have very constrained resources to allocate to that protection," said Mike Crest, general manager of CA Technologies Recovery Management and Data Modeling business. "Given this conundrum, the distinct and substantial advantages that CA ARCserve D2D offers over competing products – as clearly demonstrated by NTL’s independent testing—can be of extraordinary value to both IT and the business."