CA ARCserve Now Up-to-Date

CA, Inc. announced the evolution of the CA ARCserve family of products designed to provide protection, recovery and availability for customers’ systems, applications and data.

The major new releases of CA ARCserve Backup, CA ARCserve Replication, CA ARCserve High Availability (formerly CA XOsoft Replication and High Availability), and an innovative new disk-to-disk backup and restore product, CA ARCserve D2D, help organizations control their critical data anywhere, anytime as business needs change.

Announced today, CA ARCserve r15 builds on CA ARCserve r12.5, which included virtualization enhancements and built-in data deduplication, with new features like infrastructure visualization and granular restore of Microsoft Active Directory, to continue to help companies reduce cost and increase operational efficiency.

This new release also includes the new CA ARCserve D2D product for near instantaneous recovery and patent-pending I2 Technology that, like deduplication, drastically reduces storage space, network traffic and load on production servers.

“Our customers need to leverage new technologies and solutions to make IT more effective in meeting today’s demanding business requirements,” said Adam Famularo, senior vice president and general manager of CA’s Recovery Management and Data Modeling business unit. “With the CA ARCserve Family of Products, we continue to deliver enhanced data protection and availability products to help them achieve these goals.”

The r15 products are focused on delivering total protection, recovery and availability of critical business information by extending the IT administrator’s ability to protect systems, applications and data regardless of changes in their environment such as remote office/branch office expansion; policy changes driven by regulatory compliance; M&A activity and technology transformation such as deployment and upgrades to new applications like Microsoft SharePoint or server virtualization and data migration.

With more than 20 applications and platforms supported, the CA ARCserve Family of Products is designed to provide a complete strategy for managing data on everything from a single physical server to multi-server, hybrid physical and virtual IT environments.

“Today, IT managers face a multitude of challenges and business requirements forcing them to adapt their data protection requirements to adequately safeguard their business-critical data,” said Robert Amatruda, research director, data protection and recovery at IDC. “CA’s ARCserve r15 release provides IT managers an integrated set of tools allowing them to support multiple protection and availability use cases, from legacy to the latest physical and virtualized servers and operating systems.”

The new CA ARCserve solution includes:

CA ARCserve Backup r15
CA ARCserve Backup extends its comprehensive data protection, 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 and ensure the integrity and availability of data. This high-performance solution now combines innovative disk and tape backup features – including data deduplication, granular restore and infrastructure visualization – with state-of-the-art technologies to support efficient backup, reduce management time, avoid unplanned downtime and provide fast ROI across Microsoft Windows, UNIX, Linux and NetWare in both physical and virtual environments.

Highlights of the new features and enhancements include:

• Granular Restoration of Microsoft Active Directory to help save time and maximize flexibility for restores.
• Granular Restoration of SharePoint to help speed recovery of critical business information within a SharePoint environment.
• Infrastructure Visualization supports efficient administration and system utilization by providing an easy-to-read network diagram view of the entire environment and a simple drill down on each component to check status, backup methodology, and other key information.
• UNIX/Linux Data Movers for SAN-Based Backups helps save time, resources and costs by providing faster, more efficient backup and restoration of databases and file systems on UNIX and Linux servers.
• Global Dashboard reduces management complexity, helps avoid unplanned downtime and helps ensure compliance with corporate policies via world-wide operational monitoring and SRM reporting across all offices from a single location.
• Enhanced SRM Reporting provides greater reliability and supports compliance with new reports that help ease management of the environment and enable proactive problem avoidance.
• Agent Support for Microsoft Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010 and IBM Lotus Domino 8.5 Attachment and Object Service (DAOS) to support seamless backup across a broad range of platforms.

“CA has taken ARCserve Backup to yet another level with this new release, continuing to add very useful features, while improving ease-of-use and performance,” said Kernel Thomas, manager of networking services for TheStreet.com. “The improvements in user-friendliness and automation for daily maintenance tasks, as well as new alerts and features that help optimize backup scheduling, reaffirm CA ARCserve as the best way for us to ensure reliable backup and recovery of files, email and video across our physical and virtual servers.”

CA ARCserve D2D
The new addition to the CA ARCserve Family of Products provides rapid, simple and reliable protection and recovery for Windows disk-based servers, supporting multiple Windows platforms and Microsoft applications. It provides bare metal restoration to dissimilar hardware, and CA’s new, block-level incremental backup technology to help drastically reduce backup windows, network traffic, disk storage requirements and the impact of backup and recovery on the performance of business applications. CA ARCserve D2D is quick to download and install, and is designed to improve productivity and collaboration by offering an easy-to-use Web 2.0 interface and browser. It can be used stand-alone, or work with other CA ARCserve products to manage environments that include tape or require that data be replicated to remote offices.

Highlights of the new product include:

• Protection for Virtual Servers simplifies operations and saves training time by providing a single user interface to help protect both virtual and physical platforms.
• Block-Level Infinite Incremental Backup saves time, storage space and CPU resources using CA’s patent-pending, block-level I2 Technology for intelligently managed backups.
• Single Snapshot Backup with Four Restore Types saves time and helps maximize flexibility by rapidly restoring files, volumes, databases, or the entire system to any server in both physical and virtual environments in just one pass.
• Bare Metal Recovery to Dissimilar Hardware saves time and improves reliability by providing a very fast way to recover a crashed server to hardware that can be the same or different than the original machine – which can reduce to just minutes a process that can potentially take as much as 36 hours.
• Application-Consistent Snapshot Backups support rapid and accurate application recovery by helping to ensure the integrity of backups.
• High-Frequency Backups help ensure strong protection and improved control over recovery points by leveraging new I2 Technology to facilitate backups as frequently as every 15 minutes.
• New Web 2.0 Interface with Dynamic Documentation enables faster learning, easy access to more resources, and a better user experience for the administrator.
• End-User Search and Restore saves time and resources by finding and recovering data in files and folders without administrator intervention.
• Use with CA ARCserve Backup r15 provides the flexibility to store data on tape for off-site, long-term retention by enabling administrators to easily migrate CA ARCserve D2D backup files to tape.
• Use with CA ARCserve Replication and High Availability r15 provides the flexibility to provide additional protection and rapid recovery in the event of a data center outage by replicating ARCserve D2D backups to a remote site.
• Remote Office / Branch Office Protection helps improve protection and reliability by enabling CA ARCserve D2D to back up all ROBO office data to local disk, and then use CA ARCserve Replication to replicate the backup files to a central location.
• Broad Platforms and Application Support that protects multiple customer IT environments by supporting Microsoft Windows 2003 and 2008 on 32 and 64 bit platforms; Microsoft Exchange (2003, 2007, 2010), SQL Server 2005 and 2008 databases; and SharePoint 2007 & 2010. It also supports VMware, Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer virtualization platforms.

“CA ARCserve D2D is an essential piece of software that completes the data protection solution puzzle,” said Yeap Kah Hoe, consultant at Maxmulia Holdings. “With CA ARCserve D2D, we are now able to offer a simple, easy-to-use and yet powerful data protection solution for SMB customers. In addition, large organizations can also use CA ARCserve D2D to protect their small remote sites, with the added flexibility to keep the backup data at either the remote locations or centralized at headquarters.”

CA ARCserve Replication r15
CA ARCserve Replication, formerly known as CA XOsoft Replication, helps IT ensure continuous data protection, and fast and easy data migration at the data center and remote offices. Designed to complement any backup solution, it is quickly and easily deployed and managed through a unified, web-based console. It helps integrate application-aware replication and continuous data protection (CDP) to help ensure the protection and recoverability of applications, files, emails and databases across Windows, Linux and UNIX in both physical and virtual environments.

It also helps customers migrate data from old servers to new servers, from physical servers to virtual servers, from remote offices to the data center, and from the data center to any remote location for disaster recovery. It helps IT ensure replicated data is available and recoverable when needed. Integrated VSS Snapshot Management enables application-consistent backups when used with CA ARCserve Backup, CA ARCserve D2D, or other commercial backup solutions.

Highlights of the new features include:

• Offline Synchronization reduces network constraints, speeds deployment and cuts time-to-protection for large data sets and databases by transferring a VSS snapshot to removable media and restoring to the replica server for the initial data synchronization.
• Multiple Replication Levels (continuous, periodic, ad-hoc) helps IT optimize network efficiency by balancing network resource utilization with the required level of protection – ideal for events such as periodically replicating data from remote offices to a central data center or disaster recovery site.
• New Application Support extends flexibility and reliability by adding support for Exchange 2010 and Dynamics CRM v4, as well as enhancements for IIS Server.
• NTFS Sparse File Support saves additional time and resources by enabling replication of compressed/deduplicated files, avoiding unnecessary replication for lower bandwidth and storage requirements.
• Linux/UNIX Hard Links Support helps further extend time and resource savings by avoiding unnecessary replication.

CA ARCserve High Availability r15
CA ARCserve High Availability, formerly known as CA XOsoft High Availability, helps maximize system, application and data uptime and availability to meet demanding service level agreements (SLAs) and disaster recovery strategies. It protects any Windows, Linux and UNIX file servers, applications or databases, including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, IIS, and Dynamics CRM, as well as Oracle and Blackberry Servers on physical and virtual servers. It includes all CA ARCserve Replication r15 features, and adds server and application-level monitoring, automated and push-button failover, and push-button failback. CA ARCserve Assured Recovery provides automated non-disruptive recovery testing to help ensure failover systems will work when needed.

Highlights of the new features include:

• Full System High Availability provides replication and failover of an entire physical or virtual server in a Windows-based system, including the operating system, system state, applications and data.
• Server Group Management helps improve application performance after failover (typically to a remote location) by handling groups of servers collectively to protect distributed, farm-deployed applications such as SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, web applications, and document repositories.
• UNIX/Linux High Availability extends High Availability to Windows, UNIX, and Linux systems, applications and data through a unified management console.
• New Application Support extends protection and high availability to Exchange 2010 and Dynamics CRM v4.

“We are delighted with the new features we tested in CA ARCserve High Availability r15,” said Srikanth Subramanian, systems manager at Sify Technologies Limited. “Powerful facilities like Offline Synchronization and Full System High Availability will help customers maintain the integrity and availability of applications with minimal strain on resources. By helping us test our DR setup without business disruption, the automated DR testing feature is also very valuable, while Continuous Data Protection capabilities establish a highly reliable DR environment with very, very minimal difference between primary and secondary data. The numerous enhancements to the CA ARCserve Family of Products offer customers tremendous business value in safeguarding their systems, applications and data stored on diverse physical and virtual environments, both locally and in remote offices."

“It’s very refreshing to see a software company like CA put such effort into truly listening to customers and understanding their business needs—and this effort is plainly evident in the powerful products that make up the CA ARCserve r15 Family,” said Bob Venero, president and CEO of Future Tech Enterprise, a value-added solutions provider. “Having taken a close look at this latest impressive release, we’re so convinced that businesses will share our excitement with the value delivered here that we are giving our qualified customers—new and existing alike—net 150 day terms on all products included in the CA ARCserve r15 family. We’re not a company that takes big risks, but we’re willing to bet big on the exceptional value proposition that CA and the ARCserve r15 release brings to the table.”

"As a new CA reseller partner, we’re having a very good experience working with the company and are drawn to its products, like CA ARCserve Replication and CA ARCserve D2D, which are tremendous fits for the needs of our small-company customer base," said Chris Porosky, president of Red Road Networks. "CA ARCserve D2D is a really powerful product on a lightweight footprint, coupling fast backup and bare metal restoration capabilities with support for virtualization, which will help customers get the most of out of IT environments that sometimes rely on just a single server. We’re excited to see CA, a larger, more established company become more involved in this market, and were pleasantly surprised to find the CA ARCserve D2D beta to be more solid than many similar backup products already in general availability."

“CA ARCserve Backup r15 packs a lot of flexible features and functionality into a very easy-to-use package,” said Sal Rando, lead systems operator for the Fashion Institute of Technology. “We’re particularly impressed with its recoverability and the granular restore capabilities for Active Directory, which are huge considerations as we look to consolidate our point products and settle on a single backup and recovery solution.”

"Customers are increasingly expressing the need for a lightning-fast backup and recovery tool that is easy to operate, extremely reliable and technically flexible," said Kai Wittenburg, CEO of neam IT-Services. "CA has found that sweet spot in the impressive new CA ARCserve D2D, with an intuitive Web 2.0 user interface that enables administrators to set up and perform backups in minutes, and quickly recover data in multiple formats-all with the flexibility to conduct bare metal restores on hardware that can be very different than the source system."

"Compared to many other backup products, CA ARCserve D2D is refreshingly easy to install, configure and use – enabling customers to set up and begin backup processes in less than an hour and without tinkering with SCSI controllers or tape drives,” said Zelko Lukacevic, consulting engineer at Computer Integrations Australia. “Given the increasingly affordable and readily available external hard drives on the market today, CA ARCserve D2D presents a very compelling value proposition to SMEs, empowering them to be more backup-conscious than ever before.”

“A key enabler of remote disaster recovery, the support for server group failover in CA ARCserve High Availability r15 allows us to reliably fail over all the servers and applications that depend on each other as a group to perform critical business functions,” said Jennifer Lim, product manager, Avnet Partner Solutions Pte Ltd. “What’s more, we can now also include Oracle for UNIX and Linux platforms among our high availability plans. This additional platform support, combined with ease of use and implementation, helps ensure that we provide availability as fast as possible and across the full range of systems in the business environment.”

“After testing the CA ARCserve Backup r15 beta, the new benefits became obvious, starting with significant improvement in backup throughput and smaller backup windows,” said Darren Ong, system engineer at Maxmulia Holdings Sdn Bhd. “In addition, while improved management capabilities are sure to make our lives easier as well, we liked the enhanced interface and visualization the most, giving us a new level of control over our backup environment.”

“Like many organizations, we rely heavily on email systems to conduct our day-to-day business, and our users expect nothing less than 24×7 availability,” said David Jao, director of Corporate Information Technology at Hazen and Sawyer, P.C. “With support for Microsoft Exchange 2010, CA ARCserve High Availability r15 delivers automated failover after unplanned outages that provides the system uptime our users demand, and without unnecessary complexity.”

“Given our finite resources, we’re looking to get reliable backup and restore functionality from a product that is simple to use and able to handle technical nuances without a fuss,” said Eric Evans, communications coordinator at Geer Nursing and Rehabilitation. “We are very impressed by the streamlined interface and Web 2.0 capability of CA ARCserve D2D, as well as its flexible bare-metal restore capability, which gets the job done right the first time and without a lot of configuration complexity or second-guessing.”