CA Adds Replication, CDP, Disaster Recovery To ARCServe

The Islandia, N.Y.-based software vendor on Wednesday unveiled BrightStor ARCServe Backup/WANSyncHA, a software bundle that includes WANSync high-availability and Assured Recovery disaster-recovery software from XOsoft, which CA acquired in July.

With the XOsoft software, which will be available as an option, ARCServe can be used as an integrated package for high-performance backups, data replication locally or over a WAN, and CDP, said Frank Jablonski, director of product marketing for CA's recovery management products.

With CDP, changes to data are backed up immediately or at certain predefined intervals to allow users to be able to instantly recover a deleted, corrupted or modified file. While many applications allow data changes to be captured on the fly, others back up the changes at set intervals.

Tom Horne, vice president and COO of Computer Integrated Services Company of New York, a long-time ARCServe solution provider and an XOsoft partner, welcomed the move to integrate the technologies into a single offering. Before CA acquired XOsoft, trying to tie the backup and data replication processes was difficult, he said.

"But CA now bundles it into the backup software. For me, this makes everything a lot easier," Horne said. "We can offer a bundled solution and sell it without a lot of bells and whistles. It gives customers a solution they can handle easily. And in the disaster recovery world, that's not easy."

The bundled solution uses the WANSync software to replicate data to a second data storage device, and it uses CDP for point-in-time copies of the data to allow recovery of that data if it gets corrupted, Jablonski said. It also uses Assured Recovery to queue up the replications and test them against the primary data copies to validate that they can be used to recover data.

"This lets you know you have a known, good copy of the data and lets you go to the CIOs and tell them they can recover that data," he said.

CDP helps prevent the replication of corrupted data, according to Jablonski. "But CDP has not worked as a stand-alone solution," he noted. "That's why Symantec acquired [Lexington, Mass.-based CDP developer] Revivio. CDP needs to be integrated into a solution."

The move to offer the XOsoft technology as an option to ARCServe gives CA solution providers an opportunity to go to current customers for add-on business, Jablonski said.

"You can take customers from simple backups to additional CDP and disaster-recovery capabilities," he said. "A lot of people talk about disaster recovery, but not a lot talk about testing disaster recovery plans. It's very difficult. The XOsoft technology makes it easy. Customers can queue up the replicated data on another system, test the recovery and then merge new data changes into the replication."

Solution providers also can take the new XOsoft technology to customers that use competing backup software such as Symantec's Backup Exec, Jablonski added. "Who knows? Over time, the customer may find the technology ties in with ARCServe much better and switch over," he said.

Another solution provider opportunity exists in VMware business. Jablonski said that instead of setting up 10 physical servers in a remote location as replication targets for 10 servers in their primary data center, customers can set up 10 virtual servers on one large physical server.

The new XOsoft software is available now at a list price starting at about $2,100.