CA ARCserve r16 Unifies Data Protection

CA Technologies announced ARCserve r16, an hybrid data protection solution that enables customers and service providers to safeguard the availability of critical data, applications and services across their increasingly diverse mix of virtual, conventional, and cloud resources.

CA ARCserve r16 unifies data management functions through a scalable, modular architecture that also facilitates integration with third-party software such as remote monitoring tools, management platforms, and solutions from service providers, like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, N-able and LabTech.

CA ARCserve r16 further simplifies management of heterogeneous IT environments by allowing customers to purchase multiple data protection functionalities with a single license based on the total amount of data they need to protect. This licensing model also makes it easy for service providers to price and package complete data protection and management solutions to their customers. CA ARCserve r16 is also available through traditional licensing models.

"Today’s IT organizations are spending inordinate time and money to protect critical services—often relying on a mix of ‘point’ backup solutions for conventional servers, virtual infrastructure and cloud resources that leave them exposed to the risk of a highly damaging outage," said Mike Crest, general manager of Data Management at CA Technologies."CA ARCserve r16 addresses this problem by dramatically reducing the cost and effort required to implement data protection across diverse IT environments."

Protection for Virtualized Infrastructure
A new offering, CA ARCserve r16 Central Host-Based VM Backup, empowers organizations to protect their virtual infrastructure with image-based host-level protection for VMware vSphere, as well as full system replication and high availability supporting Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer. By providing both bare-metal recovery and system failover of complete VMs, it enables organizations to meet their stringent restore SLAs. Recovery of individual applications and granular recovery of targeted files and folders can be accomplished within minutes.

"Downtime is not an option in today’s highly competitive world, where businesses must be more agile than ever despite finite resources," said Eric Rockwell, president of centrexIT, a San Diego-based provider of technology management services. "We’re migrating our customers from Symantec to CA ARCserve for a variety of reasons – including its overhead-slashing infinite incrementals functionality, its ready-to-go virtualization support, its reliability and its unbeatable replication capabilities." 

With the new CA ARCserve r16 Central Virtual Standby, customers can schedule the conversion of image-based recovery points to VMware Virtual Disk or Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk formats. By making these backup images available as standby virtual machines, customers can speed the recovery of data and services.

"Since implementing CA ARCserve as the primary disaster recovery solution to help ensure the availability of key business systems in our highly virtualized environment, we’ve reduced our recovery time from more than three days to less than four hours," said Prashanth Thirumlai, IT infrastructure manager at The Haskell Company, a $500 million integrated design-build firm based in Jacksonville, Florida. "We find the flexibility, intuitiveness, the centralized architecture, and rich reporting of CA ARCserve r16 to be especially valuable as the sophistication and complexity of our environment continues to evolve."

Support for the Cloud
CA ARCserve r16 introduces a common cloud connection layer across all data protection components—including traditional file backup, disk imaging, replication and high availability. This provides integrated access to hybrid cloud storage, enabling customers to take advantage of public and private cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure and Eucalyptus, for purposes such as remote, off-site data protection, archiving and failover.

CA ARCserve r16 also allows customers to use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as their disaster recovery infrastructure helping to ensuring they can be up and running quickly in the event of a problem with their on-premises infrastructure. This technology can eliminate the costs associated with the purchase of redundant hardware and cloud computing charges as part of a business continuity plan.

CA ARCserve r16 also enables service providers and their customers to protect systems and data both locally (for end-user or administrator recovery), and in the cloud (to protect critical data files offsite for disaster recovery).

"The banks that rely on our data protection services are subject to strict regulatory scrutiny," said Terry Oehring, founder and CEO of Solis Security, an MSP specializing in providing information security for financial institutions. "By leveraging CA ARCserve, we can reliably and cost-effectively enable our customers to meet this key challenge by accurately targeting the data that they need to protect and securely replicating it offsite in the cloud." 

Additional Enhancements Across Solution Set
All major components of CA ARCserve r16 – including ARCserve Backup, ARCserve D2D and ARCserve Replication and High Availability – have been updated with enhancements, including new AES encryption to secure data in transfer and at rest, as well as integration between traditional and image-based backup.

In addition, CA ARCserve continues to offer integrated backup to disk, tape or cloud, storage resource management, infrastructure visualization and data deduplication.

"Our research shows almost half of storage professionals are using server virtualization as an opportunity to transform server backup," said Marco Coulter, research director at TheInfoPro (a division of The 451 Group). "The hypervisor-aware technology in CA ARCserve r16 avoids expensive array replication and simplifies the P2V transition by centralizing control of replication and backup in one management interface."

"The relentless demands of day-to-day IT housekeeping tasks like data management and protection can seriously hamper the ability of IT organizations like ours to innovate," said Zachary Slavin, IT director at Sobel Affiliates, a brokerage firm within Brown & Brown, the seventh largest independent insurance intermediary organization in the world. "With the release of CA ARCserve r16, CA Technologies is once again proving that they clearly understand the nature of these enterprise housekeeping tasks – and that they know how to translate that understanding into effective, easy-to-use solutions that make those tasks far less burdensome."

"The best-of-both-worlds hybrid data protection enabled by CA ARCserve lets us give our customers complete confidence that we can restore their business systems in any type of a recovery scenario," said Jason Rorie, president of Elevated Technologies, a Houston-based provider of managed and cloud services. "Unlike other solutions that are highly proprietary and difficult to manage, CA ARCserve’s flexible virtual server replication functionality and web-based interface facilitate the delivery of all kinds of managed disaster recovery capabilities and high availability services."

"We’ve built an exceptionally easy-to-deploy data protection offering around the disk-based backup and offsite replication capabilities in CA ARCserve," said Eric Fox, director of IT Services at Fluid Networks, a systems integrator and service provider specializing in voice, video and data networks. "The granular recovery and centralized management capabilities in CA ARCserve r16 are especially compelling for both us and our value-conscious customers."

"The increasing demand and market awareness around cloud computing, virtualization and other advanced IT solutions generates new and incremental business opportunities for our channel partners, but also introduces more complexity around how to market, sell and support these advanced solutions," said William Brandel, senior director, Ingram Micro Advanced Computing Division, U.S. "The new, simplified licensing model and flexible, unified architecture introduced in the CA ARCserve r16 solution will make it easier for channel partners to successfully sell data protection services as a stand-alone managed IT service or an integrated solution that operates seamlessly in the cloud, on-premise or in a hybrid environment. As one of CA Technologies go-to-market partners, we are well positioned to help our mutual channel partners maximize their sales potential around the ARCserve r16 solution and drive greater recurring revenues."