The enhanced DR capabilities and a doubling of effective capacity will allow Arcserve to position the new appliances a little higher upmarket than before.
Data protection vendor Arcserve has announced the availability of their third generation Appliance Series, the Arcserve 9000. The major enhancement to this generation is in the Disaster Recovery [DR] capability. While the previous generation had disaster recovery abilities, this one is custom-built for that functionality.
“We had Disaster Recovery capabilities in our Arcserve 8000 series, but those boxes weren’t architected for that,” said Mark Johnson, Director of North America Presales for Arcserve. “We took what was a capability before and really made it a focus, by rearchitecting the box to be able to do it properly. The previous generation could also run into some hardware limitations based on the number of VMs. We’ve run new ones in a test environment with 39 VMs on it, and in a production environment. The new appliances can do DR without impacting the production environment at all. It gives our customers the ability to scale up.”
The new appliances come integrated with a cloud-based DR with up to 20 CPU cores and 768 GB RAM, and have an effective capacity that is twice as large as before, which can protect up to 504TBs of data per appliance, with up to a 20:1 deduplication ratio.
“It’s a totally self-contained DR solution, with the host built in, and cross-hypervisor support so we can spin up recovery points on any host,” Johnson said. “It also has High Availability built in, so it could be a target for failover as well. In addition, since DR strategy revolves around cost and testing, with the ability to automate the DR process using our assured recovery, customers can use infrastructure for testing failover and its all self-contained.”
Arcserve’s appliance line has been focused squarely on mid-market customers in the past, and while that remains its sweet spot, the company thinks the big leap in performance may make it more attractive to some larger customers.
“I think it moves us upmarket a little bit,” Johnson said. “That’s because of the larger capacity and the ability to replicate more VMs.”
“I think it makes it especially more attractive in enterprises that have more of a decentralized environment,” said Sue Fossnes, director of NA channel programs at Arcserve. “These are a good fit for that, as well our core midmarket customers. These appliances will let us reach customers with a little bit of a larger footprint.”
Other product enhancements include quicker deployment time, with an all-in-one option for on-appliance and offsite backup DR that can be deployed in under 15 minutes. Onsite hardware support is also available in as little as four hours
“We have also made licensing changes, so now the only additional spend is if a customer wants real time asynchronous replication,” Johnson said. “They can now replicate unlimited nodes based on the size of the appliances. The advantages are that it is simpler, and at a given point it will save them money – once they get beyond four or five nodes as compared with licensing on a node-per-node basis.”
“The new appliance series will really help to position our partners as trusted advisors within their account,” Fossnes said. “Customers have DR strategies but some are complex, or cobbled together from multiple solutions, or have become ineffective over time. This positions them to offer a turnkey DR solution for midmarket customers. It also gives them another reason to go back to their customer base and talk about DR overall. It lets them increase customer confidence and their ability to recover if disaster strikes – and position themselves as the expert.”
