CA Technologies has announced CA arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP), the next generation of the venerable arcserve product, which provides cost-effective backup and Assured Recovery across mixed IT environments, and which remains a 100% channel solution for the company.

“Before, we had three versions of arcserve — Backup, D2D and  RHA [Replication and High Availability],” said Steve Fairbanks, Vice President of Product Delivery for the Data Management business at CA Technologies. “This is the unification of the arcserve capabilities into a single platform, and it is the new platform on which arcserve will move forward. The legacy products will still be available for a while. This   will be the one solution,  but it will be a year or two before that occurs as we build out the capabilities.”

Fairbanks stressed that UDP is not a bolt-on of the old product lines.

“We have rewritten the architecture from the ground up in a meaningful and deep way,” he said. “It’s not a light integration.”

The heart of the unified CA arcserve UDP is the new resource saving recovery point server (RPS). It combines true global source-side de-duplication, integrated block-level replication, AES 256-bit level encryption, and cascading retention policies. The same solution also handles Microsoft Windows, Linux and UNIX systems.

Features include agentless extended virtual machine protection for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V environments, Assured Recovery with local and virtual remote standby and automated, non-disruptive disaster recovery testing and reporting, and continuous, full-system replication and High Availability for near-instant recovery of an entire system.

“The High Availability is a significant differentiator for us,” Fairbanks said. “Most competitors don’t have the true HA capability that we have.”

Fairbanks said that the timing of the UDP offering will give CA an advantage in the ultra-competitive backup and recovery market.

“The market is very large – over 5 billion and growing at over 9% according to Gartner,” he said. “Gartner also says that as much as 30% of the market could also be changing hands in the next couple years. There’s a migration trend happening because of cost, complexity and capability issues. A lot of customers are looking to replace their existing vendor. So we see this as excellent timing.”

Many customers still have multiple backup solutions, often from multiple vendors, and arcserve UDP’s unified architecture and ability to do all the backup jobs should be attractive to customers, Fairbanks said.

“This will provide cost advantages in many ways,” he said. “Customers may have different vendors for tape, disk, HA and virtual backup and a lot of companies still have 4-5 products. This will allow them to standardize on a single vendor and also have significant savings by consolidating on one solution.”

Fairbanks said that UDP’s unified architecture and single web-based user interface will give CA an advantage over complex multi-purpose backup offerings in the market.

“Ease of use has always been a differentiation for us, because arcserve has always been easy to use, but this extends that because it takes an hour or less to get up and running, and does not require professional services,” he said.

CA arcserve UDP also features simplified licensing and pricing.

“The backup landscape used to be all about options and agents and there were literally thousands of different SKUs,” Fairbanks said. “Customers are tired of that. We have standardized into 5 SKUS and two  different ways to license – by TB or per socket. It’s all very straightforward.”

With this new release, the spelling of the product – which used to be ARCserve – has changed, and the logo and graphics have been completely refreshed.

“It’s in keeping with an exciting new product,” Fairbanks said. “The messaging for customers is — have you looked at arcserve lately?”

This article originally appeared on eChannelLine.com.