Review: New BrightStor ARCserve Speeds Backup

In an automated process, ARCserve's installation wizard queries the target system to help identify which options should be installed. The wizard also finalizes most of the configuration so that a backup can be performed immediately.

ARCserve is administered from an HTML-based management console called Backup Manager, which is used to activate wizards that perform backup and restore tasks, manage logs and send notifications. Intuitive in its operation, solution providers won't have to spend too much time with Backup Manager to get up to speed. Cross-release integration ensures that users of previous versions of ARCserve won't have to do more work to upgrade than new users. For example, version 11 can manage version 9 servers and can be managed by BrightStor Enterprise Backup server version 10.5.

The new version brings to the table enhanced ease of use, greater reliability, more extensive scalability and new technology that maximizes the efficient use of all available storage resources. A new tutorial launches automatically to help create the first backup. ARCserve has always let administrators generate standard reports as well as make custom reports based on the information most important to them.

New precanned reports include ones for Test Run, Backup Source Status, Backup Failure, Recovery and Backup Size. Encryption has also been improved with a triple-DES 168-bit encryption algorithm. Version 11 also now supports 64-bit Windows servers and Windows Storage Server 2003.

CA, Islandia, N.Y., claims that ARCserve 11 is more than 30 percent faster than version 9 when doing backups and more than 40 percent faster when doing restores. That, plus a host of new features and greater compatibility, gives solution providers and their clients good reason to upgrade.