The big theme around this release is expanded protection against ransomware, which is the focus of the new Sophos integration, but the release also contains major expansions of partnerships with Nutanix and Oracle.

Today, Arcserve is announcing the availability of their Arcserve Unified Data Protection [UDP] 8.0, which provides integrated cloud backup, cybersecurity, and disaster recovery to all types of deployments. The release contains approximately 35 new features, with the most notable being new ransomware protection through the further expansion of Arcserve’s strategic partnership with Sophos. Other feature enhancements are based on expanded relationships with Nutanix and Oracle.

“Ransomware is the main thing here,” said Sam Roguine, backup, DR and ransomware prevention evangelist at Arcserve. “It’s rampant. It’s growing. It’s everywhere. It used to be 30-40% of customers’ concern, but now it’s what they buy DR for. So the focus will continue to be around ransomware.”

Arcserve is addressing this problem through the latest expansion of their relationship with cybersecurity vendor Sophos, which began in September 2019. Arcserve UDP 8.0 adds an integration with Sophos Intercept X explicitly to protect critical data backup infrastructure against ransomware.

“We are very excited to work with them,” Roguine said. “There is a lot of synergy between who they target and us. We have had ransomware protection in our hardware products, but it’s not comparable to what Sophos has created. So we decided that joining forces with Sophos is a key addition to solving the problem of ransomware evolving, and the insecure backups and inability to recover that can result.”

Arcserve UDP 8.0 also provides further protection against ransomware by adding immutable cloud storage for the first time.

“Customers will be able to store a copy of their data in the cloud, on AWS, and make it immutable, protected by AWS Object Lock,” Roguine said. “That  immutable copy ensures a copy of the data will be available to be restored. This is new in 8.0.”

ArcServe has already been partnered with Nutanix around support of the Nutanix AHV hypervisor and backed of Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure. That partnership is extended in Arcserve UDP 8.0 with the addition of support for Nutanix Files workloads, and the addition of Nutanix Objects as a backup target.

“Unlike some vendors, our object storage data repositories are deduplicated globally, which is close to unique in the industry, so he ability to use Nutanix Objects as a data store for primary backups is complemented by scalability and resiliency,” Roguine noted.

He added that Nutanix is an extremely significant partner for Arcserve.

“Because it’s a smaller part of the market compared to VMware or Hyper-V, many vendors treat AHV as separate, with a separate interface,” he said. “With us, it’s pretty much a drop-down. We have more than 70,000 customers, and they have everything under the sun. It’s important to protect everything that they have. With Nutanix customers, AHV adoption is 49%, so we have to have solid support of that. We also go to market together with Nutanix, and AHV is very important there.”

Arcserve UDP 8.0 also adds a native Oracle data protection integration through Oracle Recovery Manager [RMAN]. While Arcserve’s backup solution has supported RMAN for many years, it is new to the UDP offering.

“We had support for Oracle databases before with Microsoft VSS, but Oracle DBAs want things that are native,” Roguine said. “Customers want Oracle database backup with RMAN. Channel partners asked us for the same thing. And with Oracle continuing to be dominant in on-prem databases, with 42%, of the market, and we want to continue to target that.”

Roguine also emphasized that strong Oracle support is not consistent throughout the backup market, even among companies who sell into the enterprise.

“We were surprised how many competitors don’t have features that Oracle DBAs want, like restoring individual tables,” he said. “Many do not have that. Depth of integration is also an issue. Some of the big boys have the native integration, but the backup has to be done in RMAN. Some don’t have any integration with RMAN at all. The need is here.”