CA Bundles Storage, Antivirus Software For Channel

The two applications are fully integrated with each other under the CA Protection Suite, allowing them to work together seamlessly, said David Liff, vice president of storage at CA.

This allows files to be scanned for viruses when backed up and when restored, Liff said. Files that were scanned during a backup are also tagged as "scanned" so that they do not have to be rescanned during the restore, he said.

Greg Knieriemen, vice president of marketing at Chi, Warrensville Heights, Ohio, said integrating security and storage certainly resonates with his company's business model as a growing storage-centric solution provider moving to quickly add security to its practice.

"From what we've seen, the marriage [of storage and security] can be very successful," Knieriemen said. "Security is creeping up more and more as part of storage. But until now, we've had no single solution in our back pocket."

Antivirus scanning becomes an important issue in the growing disk-to-disk backup space, said Knieriemen. "With disk-to-disk backups, you are constantly overwriting data to a hard drive, and if there is no time mark on the data, you could be overwriting data with corrupted data or files," he said.

The CA Protection Suite is expected to ship by the end of October for the Windows environment, said Liff. List price is $895, a savings of about 20 percent compared with purchasing ArcServe and eTrust separately, he said. That price includes a license for 10 nodes for the eTrust software, he said.

Solution providers that sell the bundle are eligible for a $50 spiff, Liff said.

Other bundles featuring the CA Protection Suite along with specific agents for disaster recovery in Windows environments, Exchange and SQL will also be available and eligible for the spiff, he said.