CA Plans Major ARCserve Release And Rebranding For CA World
Adam Famularo, senior vice president and general manager for CA's Recovery Management and Data Modeling Business Unit, said his company plans to use CA World to introduce several new major features to ARCserve, and to rebrand its existing XOsoft products with the ARCserve name. CA World is scheduled for May 16 to May 20 in Las Vegas.
ARCserve 15, the new version of the data protection suite, will have two key components: ARCserve Backup for a complete disk-to-disk-to-tape offering; and ARCserve D2D, a more lightweight version with disk-to-disk protection.
ARCserve is currently being shipped as version 12.5. Famularo said the company skipped version numbers 13 and 14 for cultural reasons. "The number 13 is considered unlucky in many Western countries, and any number ending with '4' is considered unlucky in many parts of Asia," he said.
The new ARCserve D2D offers bare metal recovery, which is the ability to recover a failed server and its operating system and applications on any other server regardless of brand. Famularo said ARCserve D2D will allow physical-to-virtual server and virtual-to-virtual server failover.
ARCserve D2D will be a web-based application and offer users the opportunity to join the CA community, join blogs, and give feedback directly from the user interface, he said.
Two legacy XOsoft applications will also get new capabilities and new names. One of them, ARCserve Replication, will allow live data to be replicated from physical servers to virtual servers. The other, ARCserve High Availability, will do auto-failover of mission-critical applications such as Exchange Server, Blackberry Server, and SharePoint Server, Famularo said.
Solution providers can help customers move to virtualized environments, then do backups to physical or virtual servers or to tape, Famularo said. "This is a great play for virtualized environments," he said. "Partners can use the software to help customers set up virtualized environments, and then back up data to them. We let them play both sides of the virtualization story."
The different ARCserve applications can also be used as part of a disaster recovery solution, Famularo said. "With multiple networks tied over a WAN, customers can replicate data than back it up by using the different products together," he said.
By CA World, the company also hopes to have ready a new disaster recovery offering for managed services providers, Famularo said. Such an offering would be especially interesting to partners who work with SMB customers who may not have a remote destination for their backups, he said.
CA will also use CA World to highlight cloud-based instant recovery on demand offering that is available through Ingram Micro and its Seismic software-as-a-service platform, with the partner maintaining billing and maintenance responsibilities with their customers, Famularo said.
The offering lets partners set up their customers' environments to link to CA and a third-party hosting center for failover of Exchange and other applications. "It's an insurance policy," he said. "If an SMB customer goes down, it fails over to us, and they are up and running right away."
For ARCserve, the cloud is just another backup device, Famularo said. "We'll be working with partners to look at what data needs to go to disk, to tape, or to the cloud," he said. "Whatever is best for the data."
CA's channel program has evolved over time to become one that offers good opportunities to its solution providers, Famularo said.
For instance, he said that partners can make up to 37 points of margin on product sales, which includes the extra margin that comes from registering deals.
CA is also looking to recruit partners who work with arch-rival Symantec by letting Symantec solution providers who sign with CA automatically come into the program at the same level they enjoyed with Symantec, he said.
"I'm a big believer that if a partner uses our software, they will sell it," he said. "So we also make any of our products available free-of-charge to partners who use it in their own environments, just so long as they don't use it as part of an MSP offering."
The rebranding of CA's data protection software with the ARCserve name makes a lot of sense, said Todd O'Bert, president and CEO of Productive, a Minneapolis-based solution provider and CA channel partner. "We've been using 'ARCserve' for years anyway," O'Bert said. "That's how people refer to the software. When we talk to customers, we say 'ARCserve,' and customers know who we are talking about."
CA has been doing a good job of making products that target customers of different sizes, O'Bert said. "It allows us to work with different customers, and lets us scale up with the spectrum of available products," he said.
Famularo has been doing a good job of taking CA to more of a visionary role, such as moving quickly to adopt cloud computing as part of its offerings, O'Bert added.
He has also helped ensure that CA is consistent with its channel programs, O'Bert said. "Their channel roadmap is good, better than I've ever seen it," he said. "CA has had some challenges in the past, but ever since it created a separate business unit for storage, it's come a long way in making consistency a goal."