These models are aimed at the SMB and lower mid-market spaces, but more will be following which will take on the higher midmarket where the Symantec-Veritas NetBackup 5000 plays.
Christophe Bertrand, Arcserve’s VP of Product Marketing
Arcserve, which spun out of CA Technologies in 2014, and which late in the year announced a significant extension to its offerings in the form of the first Unified Data Protection (UDP) appliance, has now announced its availability in North America in late February.
The original Arcserve backup product was one of the most mature in the industry, created by Cheyenne Software in 1990, but just before Arcserve became a separate company, the original technology was expanded into a next-generation unified data protection offering, which features global source-based deduplication, multi-site replication, tape support, and automated data recovery capabilities. The appliance puts this all in a new form factor to offer a combination of capabilities which are available in a single appliance for the first time.
“This is much more than a traditional backup appliance because it’s Unified Data Protection, which has all these capabilities, all in one appliance,” said Christophe Bertrand, Arcserve’s VP of Product Marketing. “UDP was truly designed to be on an appliance. It does well on a server, but the appliance is a great fit.”
The Arcserve UDP 7000 Appliance series is targeted at the SMB market, and its initial launch is limited to North America, with a global rollout scheduled for early fall.
“Our product strategy is to target the market with thee models and capacities up to over 20 TB,” Bertrand said. The 7100, 7200 and 7300 come with 3 TB, 6 TB and 9 TB of raw storage respectively. That translates into a total protected capacity of up to 8 TB, 17 TB, and 26 TB respectively. The 7200 and 7300 lines are also available in V models which come with three virtual standby machines. They are somewhat more expensive because they require more memory.
“The 7100 is our entry model aimed at organizations with up to 1000 employees,” Bertrand said. “With our global source-side duplication, a 3 TB system will protect up to 8 TB of data. Competitors who advertise raw storage capacities will have half of their capacity go to processing deduplication. The global source-side dedupe is a great differentiator for us.”
Bertrand said they see the full 7000 series competing in the middle and top of the SMB segment and the lower mid-market, up to organizations with about 2500 employees.
“We don’t see ourselves competing down with companies like Barracuda with this,” Bertrand said. “Unitrends and Dell we see as our biggest competitors. Veritas [the old Symantec NetBackup 5000] we don’t see competing that much with the 7000, although there will be some, but we will have bigger appliances coming which will compete with them more directly.”
In addition to the global source-side dedupe, Bertrand said that the 7000 series has major cost and usability advantages over its competitors.
“It is very easy to deploy, with a short time till the first backup, and there is a new setup wizard to improve ease of use,” Bertrand said. “These are great differentiator opportunities for partners.
“When people look at how much data they can protect with the feature set we offer, the cost per TB is better than anyone else,” Bertrand added. “There is no extra cost for replication, because it is built in.” No additional licenses are needed for deployment in an Arcserve UDP software deployment.
List prices for the 7000 Series is $USD 8,495 for the 7100, $13,895 for the 7200, $15,601 for the 7200V, $19,495 for the 7300 and $21,560 for the 7300V.
Arcserve will also be making an Elevated Cloud Service available this spring.
“We are working with a cloud vendor to set up a VM offering in the cloud with the same physical environment, where the cloud has a second level of deduplication,” said LD Weller, Arcserve’s Senior Director of Product Marketing. Weller indicated that Arcserve has been introducing a program for MSPs which features utility billing at the end of the month, and that this Elevated Cloud Service will also follow this model of invoicing at end of the month, to keep costs down.
