Arcserve UDP spans virtual and physical system, disk and tape

I had a chat with Giovanni Goduti (Giv), Arcserve’s Northern Europe Sales Director yesterday. It was an opportunity to discover what the new company has managed to achieve since being spun out of CA last August and to hear of how it has managed to speed up the processes at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability (CISL), a organisation providing thought leadership in the area of sustainability.

The company has its headquarters in Minneapolis and is currently recruiting to add to a staff of around 500 worldwide. It has 43k (mainly mid-market and SMB) customers and approximately 7.5k partners. In fact its use of third party channels is what set it apart from CA’s other businesses. It has a few OEM partners in Japan (including Fujitsu), where it claims to be the market leader.

Its latest product is its Unified Data Protection (UDP) software, launched at the time of its spin off. It includes a number of interesting features, including:

• A unified management console
• Agentless backup for virtual environments including VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen supporting Windows and Linux virtual machines
• Built-in replication and High Availability
• Global de-duplication
• Migration of disk images to tape, with granular restore from disk or tape
• Support for physical Windows and Linux servers
• Task-based data protection and availability plans

It differs from earlier products by including snapshots for virtual environments and in being a block- as opposed to file-based application. It is not exclusively a disk-based application, so users can still write their backups to tape.

CISL has used UDP to speed up the backup time from 18 to 2 hours for its 2.5TB of data widely distributed across 23 virtual and physical servers – valuable timesaving for a small, but critical IT environment. Giv noted that Arcserve’s vertical markets include education, local government, the NHS as well as commercial companies and alongside cross-vertical sales from small to big enterprise customers.

Although Arcserve does not yet offer its own cloud services, its software is often integrated into Azure, Amazon and Fujitsu clouds and customers often use the software to backup their data to MSP clouds. Its applications are also available in appliances, or as software-only products.

Arcserve’s competition includes Asigra (which only sells to MSPs) and Symantec’s Backup Exec. It has an advantage in its dedicated focus, but a challenge in letting everyone one know who it is… and for which I guess I’m doing my little bit by publishing this post!