New CA ARCserve Backup and XOsoft

CA, Inc. announced a new release of CA Recovery Management designed to help customers meet data protection, business continuity and disaster recovery challenges in tough economic times. Virtualization enhancements, built-in data deduplication and Storage Resource Management (SRM), and innovative ways to help ensure recoverability of critical business information head the list of new capabilities designed to improve efficiency and reduce the cost of data storage, protection and recovery. This is among 13 new and enhanced products announced by CA that help CIOs achieve Lean IT by reducing waste, increasing productivity and improving the customer experience.

The numerous efficiency and cost saving features in the new release are extended by the CA ARCserve ‘X-tra Value Pack’ that offers attractive pricing for CA ARCserve Backup Suite bundle, including two free copies of CA XOsoft Replication and one year of maintenance.

“Faced with tight budgets and limited staff, customers need their IT strategy for recovery management to be smarter and leaner by making better use of the existing hardware and streamlining backup and recovery practices,” said Adam Famularo, senior vice president and general manager of CA’s Recovery Management and Data Modeling business unit. “Our new Recovery Management release is loaded with new features that help meet these challenges.”

CA Recovery Management includes new releases of CA ARCserve Backup, CA XOsoft High Availability and CA XOsoft Replication, business continuity and disaster recovery software.

“IT organizations are looking for optimized and cost effective ways to maintain and manage copies of data for business continuity and disaster recovery,” said Lauren Whitehouse, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “CA’s new Recovery Management release provides backup and replication for physical and virtual environments that meets these needs, incorporating key technologies like native data deduplication, SRM, and file-level recovery from image-level backups in server virtualization environments.”

CA Recovery Management
CA ARCserve Backup r12.5 delivers comprehensive data protection with centralized management and advanced features designed to help IT do more with less at a lower cost while helping to minimize the risk of data loss. This high performance solution combines innovative disk and tape backup with state-of-the-art technologies to support efficient backup in both physical and virtual environments and powerful, integrated anti-virus and encryption tools, making it one of the most secure ‘out-of-the-box’ backup solutions offered today.

Highlights of the new features include:

• Integrated data deduplication that helps improve the economics of disk-based backup and helps save money by getting more out of existing hardware
• Deduplication of virtual machine backups in Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and VMware environments
• Virtualization support enhancements including a new 1-step granular file recovery process that helps achieve better asset optimization and saves time and resources in VMware vSphere 4 and ESX, as well as Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 environments
• Certification of virtual machine backups from Citrix XenServer environments
• Integrated SRM capabilities that help track and report on physical and virtual storage components to improve IT efficiencies with better oversight and proactive problem avoidance
• A Business Intelligence Dashboard that provides a graphical display of historical and recent activity in the backup infrastructure to help administrators proactively improve performance and reliability
• Enhanced dashboard reporting including backup status and virtual machine recovery points in VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer environments
• Ability to verify the recoverability of backed up data (including deduplicated backups) as part of a tested DR strategy
• Password management capabilities for encryption keys that boost both testing and speed of data recovery by helping ensure passwords are not lost and encrypted data can be unlocked
• Integration of Windows authentication into the audit and role management process, strengthening control and simplifying administration of user access to backup resources

“CA has taken CA ARCserve Backup to the front of the pack with this new release,” said Edward A. Eades, senior systems integrator for a mid-sized financial institution. “It will help us meet some of our most daunting challenges with leaps in the power and simplicity of deployment, configuration, GUI and reporting. SRM capabilities, support for Microsoft Hyper-V and dedupe are huge―we expect to leverage them to improve efficiency and save us a large amount of money.”

CA XOsoft High Availability r12.5
and CA XOsoft Replication r12.5

CA XOsoft Replication and CA XOsoft High Availability software provide both business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities through the integration of application-aware replication, continuous data protection (CDP), manual, scheduled and automated failover and non-disruptive, automated disaster recovery testing. These capabilities help ensure the protection and recoverability of business-critical applications, files, emails and databases in both physical and virtual environments.

CA XOsoft Replication and CA XOsoft High Availability are robust business continuity and disaster recovery solutions that integrate application-aware replication, continuous data protection (CDP), automated failover and non-disruptive, automated disaster recovery testing to help ensure the protection and recoverability of business-critical applications, files, emails and databases servers in physical and virtual environments.

Highlights of the new features include:

• Virtualization Enhancements including High Availability for VMware vCenter Server and single-instance host-level replication for Microsoft Hyper-V that help extend the efficiencies of virtual environments
• Certification of virtual machine replication and failover for Citrix, XenServer and Citrix Essentials
• Windows System State Protection and Windows Registry Synchronization provide operating system protection and recovery efficiency
• Replication for UNIX and Linux environments, offering broader protection via a single, comprehensive solution for heterogeneous environments.
• Replication and High Availability for Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007
• High Availability for the CA XOsoft Control Services to help ensure CA XOsoft system manageability
• Automated DR Testing is now included with both CA XOsoft products, at no additional cost, providing the critical ability to proactively verify the availability of the failover system with no impact to the production environment
• 64-bit native engine for x86 to x64 replication and migration
• Localization and translation into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (simplified and traditional) and Japanese for world-wide use.

“We already rely on CA XOsoft Replication to provide business continuity during unplanned outages―it has performed flawlessly when battletested,” said Joe Whipple, network administrator for KEMBA Financial Credit Union. “By eliminating a single point of failure and providing better bandwidth and process utilization, the new release is even more dependable and should save us money in hardware upgrade costs through more efficient use of both our physical and virtual servers.”

The numerous enhancements to CA Recovery Management offer customers tremendous business value in safeguarding data stored on diverse physical and virtual environments, both locally and in remote offices.

“In challenging economic times, IT needs to meet recovery management objectives in a cost-effective and efficient manner,” said, Greg Kirchoff, director, Global Partner Team at Microsoft Corp. “CA continues to innovate and deliver solutions that provide value and fulfill these evolving requirements across key Microsoft physical and virtual environments, including Windows Server® 2008 with Hyper-V technology and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.”

“CA provides one-step granular file recovery from image-level virtual machine backups in the new release of CA ARCserve Backup. This delivers the kind of backup/recovery speed and efficiency that storage administrators require in virtualized environments,” said Parag Patel, vice president, Alliances, VMware. “With the new CA Recovery Management release, CA continues to provide enhanced support for VMware vSphere 4 and VMware vCenter Server, helping our joint customers protect their data while achieving operational and cost efficiencies.”

“The explosive growth in virtualization technology is changing the game for companies from SMB to the enterprise, creating demand for comprehensive solutions that manage a complex, heterogeneous physical and virtual IT infrastructure,” said N. Louis Shipley, group vice president and general manager, XenServer Products Group, Citrix Systems. “With the combination of CA Recovery Management, Citrix XenServer and Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V and XenServer, customers now have a choice of world class vendors and cost effective solutions to meet their backup/recovery and high availability requirements across a broad spectrum of environments.”

“The design team at CA did a great job with ARCserve r12.5. The GUI, reporting and Dashboard are great―all provide more granular information and are easy to work with, flexible and intuitive,” said Jason Palm, network administrator for Clermont Senior Services. “I’m particularly interested in the Data Deduplication where we expect significant space saving on media. I am also glad to see the virtualization support as we are starting to use Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX and expect to do more going forward.”

“CA really delivered with the new release of ARCserve,” said Tom Hannum, president of Hannum Computer Services. “Among many useful new features, I was very impressed with the enhancements to the GUI and can get significant benefit from the data deduplication―I anticipate cutting my media costs in half and significantly shortening my backup window.”

“The new Recovery Management releases are further proof that CA is serious about delivering what we need to meet our customers’ needs,” said Todd O’Bert, president for Productive Corporation, a Minneapolis-based specialized reseller. “The new features in 12.5 reflect key IT requirements to do more with less and increase efficiencies.” O’Bert also commented, “The ARCserve Backup Wakeup Call program shows that CA is putting their money where their mouth is by delivering exceptional value to our customers while helping to make our business more profitable.”

“CA is doing all the right things from a product and program perspective to make it attractive for us to do business with them,” said Jodi Honore, vice president, Vendor Management for Ingram Micro. “They are delivering regular, value-added enhancements to both ARCserve and XOsoft, incorporating new technologies that accelerate business value like data deduplication and virtualization support, and offering pricing and long-term incentives to drive our mutual success.”

“We’ve already benefited from the ARCserve Backup Wakeup Call program and expect even more success with the availability of the new versions of CA ARCserve Backup and CA XOsoft,” said Kerry Parker, vice president, Corporate and Public Sector Sales for Softmart, a leading IT solutions provider. “New built-in capabilities like data deduplication, SRM and virtualization enhancements are key to adding value for our customers.”