Third-party backup is still present in only a small number of Office 365 deployments, and Arcserve believes that their rounding out the core backup requirements with OneDrive will help them expand that.
Data protection provider Arcserve has announced the new release of their Arcserve Unified Data Protection [UDP] offering, their flagship offering to protect all types of workloads. The key additions to this release are expanded Microsoft Office 365 support, through the addition of new support for Microsoft OneDrive, and the addition of support for the Nutanix AHV hypervisor.
“A big enhancement relates to our Office 365 support, which has a very high take-up rate in our platform,” said Mark Johnson, Arcserve’s director of presales. “We have now added support for OneDrive functionality.”
Johnson said that the addition of OneDrive support follows up support for the Exchange component of Office 365 18 months ago, followed by the addition of support for Sharepoint.
“With the addition of support for OneDrive, we can now talk about a comprehensive data protection for Office 365,” he said. “Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive are the three legs of the stool there. We can now back it all directly to our cloud. The number one use case now is cloud-to-cloud, so customers don’t have to use their own infrastructure, and we can now back up directly from the Office 365 cloud into the Arcserve cloud.”
Even though partners are always looking for opportunities to make more money around Office 365 by selling services on top, third-party backup of it is still under-penetrated in the market.
“For partners serving or selling O365, it’s a fantastic add-on,” Johnson stated. “Only between 8 and 10 per cent of Office 365 subscribers are presently using a third partner backup
That number is from IDC,” said Stephen Thomas, Arcserve’s SVP of North American sales. “The fact that it is low comes from a lack of proper understanding of how shared responsibility models work. When it comes to things involving the public cloud, many customers assume there is no effective responsibility for them to take action in protecting their data.”
“When companies move to Office 365, part of the attraction is to lessen the burden on their IT staff,” Johnson said. “So they put it up in Microsoft’s Cloud, it is replicated, and they are protected to a certain degree. But long-term retention and things like that aren’t fully understood. They need some additional functionality.”
That’s a key reason why partners also need to understand their data protection provider’s full set of capabilities,” Thomas added.
The other major innovation in this release is a move into the hyper-converged infrastructure [HCI] space, with new agentless protection for production workloads on the Nutanix AHV hypervisor, and the ability to leverage Nutanix AHV as a disaster recovery platform.
“We started developing this close to a year ago, working with Nutanix, and have developed it as a complete end-to-end solution for Nutanix,” Johnson said. “It is fully integrated with the Nutanix Prism management solution, and is fully compatible with the Nutanix environment.”
“This is our first HCI integration where we are all-in,” Thomas stated. “We can protect other HCI environments to a certain degree, but the first time that we have had an HCI integration at this level.”
While the AHV hypervisor has a much lower penetration rate in the industry compared to VMware, or even Microsoft, the integration will make it easier for Nutanix to woo customers to their free hypervisor, and expand Arcserve’s market that way.
“It’s a conversation that Nutanix can take to existing customers, and expands their opportunity to replace existing devices,” Thomas said. “As customers talk about replacing existing infrastructure with HCI, we want to be part of that conversation.”
Other HCI integrations are likely to follow.
“We have been able to get in front of other HCI vendors, and partners as well,” Johnson indicated.
