The cloud itself comes from a partner, which does have a Canadian data centre capacity. It is first available as an integration with Arcserve’s UDP appliance and is likely to have special appeal to MSPs, including those not presently offering managed services.
Christophe Bertrand, Arcserve’s VP of Product Marketing
Minneapolis-based backup and recovery provider Arcserve has launched the Arcserve cloud, which greatly enhances the company’s cloud capability and provides new disaster recovery capabilities for SMB customers.
“Before, we supported connectors to the traditional cloud players like Amazon,” said Christophe Bertrand, Arcserve’s VP of Product Marketing. “It’s a great use case but not the most complete for the SMB or even midmarket customer, as there is a level of sophistication required for recovery.”
Arcserve’s introduction of its own branded cloud capability makes recovery much more practical for this market.
“We think there will be three major use cases,” Bertrand said. “It will provide accessible offsite data recovery capabilities for SMBs and other organizations who do not have a second data centre. Another disaster recovery capability will be testing application failover.”
Bertrand said the third use case will be outside data retention, providing unlimited long-term cloud storage by using local magnetic media archiving as an alternative to tape archiving. While he said that Arcserve does not see this as an archiving service, it would accomplish pretty much the same thing as one, especially since the software allows the setting of different retention levels on different instances.
“We see the first two use cases as the primary drivers, but this third case has great potential for effectively replacing cumbersome tape services,” he said.
The Arcserve Cloud will initially be available only as a service extension to Arcserve’s UDP Appliance, and will initially be available only in North America. Arcserve rolled out the UDP appliance early this year in a similar fashion, gradually extending it, and Bertrand said Arcserve Cloud will work the same way, being extended to other products and other geos.
While the ArcServe Cloud is not designed specifically for the MSP market, the company expects it will be attractive there.
“The Cloud is for both MSPs and end users, and it will be a split business, with time telling how much the market becomes of each,” Bertrand said. “MSPs are certainly one of the target audiences. We have an MSP program, but until the Arcserve Cloud it was limited to those who had access to their own cloud, purchased a special license and provided services, which were likely a lot more than backup services. Now, partners can add the backup service without having to worry about the work to set it up, and for some VARs who do not do backup-as-a-service, now, this is a great way to add it without upfront capital investment.”
LD Weller, Arcserve’s Senior Director, Product Management
“Some of our partners are building similar cloud services exactly of the same time as this,” said LD Weller, Arcserve’s Senior Director, Product Management. “We hope and expect our MSPs will build extra values on top of this and add percentages to the price.”
Bertrand indicated that that some larger MSP partners might be interested in Arcserve Cloud to have it in their portfolio, but this class of partner might prefer what they have now, having it on-prem to deliver as a service. VARs who sell the UDP appliance to customers will be able to use the cloud as an upsell for disaster recovery and archiving.
The cloud itself comes from a partnership with a company who is specialized in the area, and while Arcserve isn’t making their name public, Bertrand said that people can be confident because they spent a lot of time vetting them.
“We are not reinventing ourselves as a cloud provider, and they will do a good job for us,” he said. He also stressed that for Canadian partners and customers concerned about data sovereignty with U.S.-based data centres, their partner does have Canadian data centre capability.
Bertrand emphasized that the Arcserve Cloud, coming at the end of a brisk year of change since the company was spun out of CA Technologies last August, shows a dynamism which he pledged will continue going forward.
“Not even a year ago, we were part of another company,” he said. “We became independent in August, launched the appliance early this year, launched a new channel program, and now have launched the Cloud. We are on a strong growth path. We are aggressively looking at additional offerings. We have put everything in place to be the market leader.”
