CA Jumps Into Hybrid Cloud Data Protection

With an eye to enterprise IT teams using hybrid cloud approaches, CA has enhanced its ARCserve data protection and recovery suite. The company's improvements to CA ARCserve r16 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 management 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 cloud-enabled ARCserve provides a connection layer between the customer's local site and cloud services such as 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 is the ability to use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to replicate the on-premises environment. In this implementation, Amazon EC2 provides a compute environment where systems are backed up and are ready to recover data from in the event of a local disaster.

According to a recent survey from the Storage Networking Industry Association and Storage Strategies NOW, 59% of those adopting cloud storage would be doing so to store secondary backup data in the cloud.

In addition, CA ARCserve r16 now supports image-based host-level data protection for VMware vSphere and high availability and system replication for Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, and Citrix XenServer. A virtual standby capability, which allows customers to schedule the conversion of image-based data to VMware virtual disks or Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk formats, is also available.

Included also in CA ARCserve r16 are synthetic full backups that allow fast recovery of data, the ability to import CA ARCserve D2D backups to move them to tape, and enhanced job scheduling and media improvements in tape environments. CA ARCserve has also been integrated with ARCserve D2D, CA's disk-based backup product, to support snapshot and file-based backups.

Further, CA has enhanced its ARCserve D2D product with protection for desktops and laptops and AES 256-bit encryption for data in-flight and at rest. The company has also built mailbox recovery for Exchange servers into ARCserve D2D and added bandwidth throttling to preserve and improve data transfer over the WAN and Internet. Among other enhancements to the CA ARCserve r16 D2D products are centralized management and reporting, as well as host-based virtual machine backup and virtual standby.

In the CA ARCserve Replication & High Availability products, CA has added 128-bit SSL encryption and support for Windows Failover Cluster.

A perpetual license for the CA ARCserve r16 suite of products ranges from $10,982 to $27,600 per terabyte of data protected. ARCserve Backup r16 costs $7,321 to $18,000 per terabyte. The products are also available on a monthly subscription basis starting at $377 to $650 per month for ARCserve Backup and $566 to $976 for the all-inclusive CA ARCserver r16 suite.

Deni Connor is founding analyst for Storage Strategies NOW, an industry analyst firm that focuses on storage, virtualization, and servers.

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