New CA ARCserve R16 offers backup from virtual to cloud

CA Technologies launched its latest software offering numerous data protection functions for virtual machines.

CA ARCserve r16 prides itself on compatibility, with support for all the major hypervisor vendors, as well as third party software and cloud computing storage – something the company believes will aid numerous enterprises in the current age of computing.

“Today’s IT organisations 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.

“CA ARCserve r16 addresses this problem by dramatically reducing the cost and effort required to implement data protection across diverse IT environments.”

The first feature in the new offering is protection for VMware’s operating system – vSphere – at the host-level, using images to backup a customer’s utilisation. Users of Microsoft’s Hyper-V or Citrix’ XenServer will be able to get full system replication and what CA deems high availability, but it will only go the extra mile for VMware users.

However, it does claim applications or individual files can be restored within minutes, helping both large companies or service providers stick to their customer agreements or SLAs.

Next up is a feature called central virtual standby, which allows customers to schedule points in time for a image to be taken of their system and copied over to either VMware Virtual Disk or Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk, depending on what they are running in-house.

But, CA ARCserve r16 isn’t just about running a virtualised data centre in-house; it is about the compatibility with the cloud as well.

The company has introduced a “common cloud connection layer” for all of its data protection functions. This means customers are able to utilise file backup, disk imaging and replication and send the data to either in-house storage or cloud storage, depending on their preference.

The main cloud CA is backing, however, is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which it suggests as disaster recovery infrastructure, helping the company to a speedy recovery if their internal backups fail.

CA had lists of satisfied customers to impress us with, from The Haskell Company, which claimed to have reduced recovery time from three days to four hours, to Elevated Technologies, who were sold on the web-based interface to manage the system.

The final selling note sung by the firm was the ability to buy these multiple data protection products under one licence, rather than buying separately from a number of rival firms, with costs based on the amount of data customers need to protect. But those looking for legacy can stick to the traditional licensing model too.

source: cloudpro