CA Technologies Releases Cloud-Enabled ARCserve

CA Technologies is looking to leverage the power of the cloud to make it simpler to back up and protect the data on enterprise networks. The latest version of CA’s backup product, ARCserve (now in version 16), is taking a pragmatic approach to backing up data stored on enterprise networks, private clouds, public clouds and hybrid clouds--focusing on the data and not so much on where it is stored.

CA ARCserve 16 provides a single solution for everything from simple file backups to image-based bare-metal recovery to full system failover and high availability, says Steven Fairbanks, VP of product management for CA's data management business. With ARCserve 16, data is protected in physical and virtual IT infrastructures, whether on premise or in the cloud, Fairbanks says.

"This is a major release for ARCserve," he says. "We're releasing a lot of capabilities for virtualized and cloud environments, and helping provide strong protection for virtual architectures and the cloud."

The integration of cloud support is highly evident with ARCserve 16, where cloud storage has become a key target element for both backup and recovery. Improvements to CA ARCserve include a hybrid cloud data protection model, host-based image backups, replication and failover, as well as virtual standby that speeds the recovery process of data across the WAN. Also included is a new console for managing backups of on-premises, cloud, virtual and physical server environments. New licensing is based on the capacity of the data being protected.

The new ARCserve works by using a connection layer between the local site and cloud services. Support is included for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure, and Eucalyptus. The connector allows remote data protection, archiving and failover applications to public, private or cold standby deployments.Cold standby offers the capability to use the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to replicate the on-site environment. When implemented, Amazon EC2 provides a compute environment with backed-up systems, which are ready to recover data in the event of a local disaster.

Fairbanks added that CA ARCserve provides centralized management of all a company's data protection, including tape or disk backups, image-based backups, replication and high availability. The capabilities are available via a single SKU with a per-terabyte license, or each can be purchased as stand-alone applications, he says.

Also announced was CA ARCserve 16 Central Host-Based VM Backup, which allows organizations to protect their virtual infrastructure with image-based, host-level protection for VMware vSphere, as well as full system replication and high availability support for Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer. Support for both full bare-metal recovery and full system failover of complete virtual machines proves to be very important for organizations driven by service-level agreements (SLAs).

Further leveraging virtualization technology, CA ARCserve 16 Central Virtual Standby allows customers to schedule automatic conversion of image-based recovery points to VMware Virtual Disk or Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk formats, which can speed recovery. CA ARCServe 16 is now shipping; potential customers can find out more about the product at http://arcserve.com/us/default.aspx

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