New wizards and additional recovery options are also aimed at helping partners sell Arcserve UDP to larger customers than before.
Christophe Bertrand, Arcserve’s VP of Product Marketing
Minneapolis-based data protection vendor Arcserve has announced the latest release of its Unified Data Protection (UDP) software, which is applicable to all of its software, appliance and cloud-based UDP solutions. This version significantly upgrades Linux capabilities, to bring it to feature parity with Windows, something the company believes will make its solutions more attractive upmarket. Other enhancements include instant VM recovery and instant Bare Metal recovery, and the addition of Getting Started wizards.
“This version 6 update to our software we consider to be very important,” said Christophe Bertrand, Arcserve’s VP of Product Marketing.
At the top of the enhancement list is a major increase to the calibre of the Linux support. While some Linux support was offered previously, the Arcserve product was originally designed for Windows, and the Linux support lagged behind.
“We have made a significant investment in Linux support, and have beefed it up significantly to provide feature parity with Windows,” Bertrand said. As a result, the full suite of UDP’s advanced Windows protection capabilities, such as global deduplication, WAN-optimized replication, and archive to tape are now available to Linux users. Linux users are also now able to leverage file/folder level recovery of Linux VMs backed up with agentless, host-based backups on vSphere and Hyper-V hosts.
“Partners consistently told us they wanted multiplatform support for Linux,” Bertrand said. “It gears up partners to go after more substantial midmarket deals. It’s not something that is critical for the lower market, but going upmarket, you need Linux.”
Bertrand indicated that version 6 also added a number of new capabilities around ease of use which they also think will open greater potential for UDP to sell upmarket.
“We are adding a number of capabilities around ease of use, particularly wizards, which make it easy for end users to install the appliance with ‘getting started’ wizards,” Bertrand said. These wizards and a Unified Product Installer get the customer up and running in minutes, as they can simply click the features they want and download in one easy step.
Intuitively, one might think these kind of wizards would be aimed more at the low end of the market with generalist IT staffs, but Bertrand said that’s not really the case here.
“At the higher end of the midmarket, a lot of customers require services,” Bertrand said. “Now ordinarily, that’s great for partners because of their margin on services. But it’s only great to a point, because if it’s too complex, customers will shy away. We think the wizards will open up more services in this market. It’s been a bit unnatural to have wizards with enterprise class products, but the role of the IT generalist is changing.”
Version 6 also introduces faster and more flexible recovery options with enterprise storage array snapshot integration, instant VM recovery, and instant Bare Metal Restore.
“With this version, we are introducing support for snapshots from NetApp FAS, and we will be adding others soon,” Bertrand sad. “The midmarket has high requirements for recovery and these options help us in that space.”
LD Weller, Arcserve’s Senior Director, Product Management
“Replication causes a yawn for the most part, but it’s something really designed not just for restores and backups, but also to do things remotely in any environment,” said LD Weller, Arcserve’s Senior Director, Product Management. “Similarly instant VM recovery is important because it matches the distributed environment that customers are demanding.”
“We have supported the public cloud from the beginning, and are the only solution with a high availability module in Amazon,” Bertrand said. “We are adding additional capability and flexibility to work with that public cloud environment, to support the ‘cloudification’ of backup. You have to have that flexibility.”
In addition to the expected Windows 10 support, Arcserve UDP now adds Exchange granular recovery for non-email items without needing to restore the entire mailbox store. Other enhancements include management authority with role-based administration, reboot-less Windows Agent deployment and a new Command Line Interface. A new Unified Tape Management module allows for the management of the scheduling, monitoring and migration of recovery points to tape directly from within the UDP console.
