Latest Arcserve DR Appliances Offer Cloud Data Recovery Capabilities

Arcserve has released the third generation of its disaster recovery and application availability appliances that aim to make it easier for small- to medium-sized business to deploy and operate them to protect their IT systems.

The latest Appliance Series 9000 models from Arcserve for the first time are able to provide disaster recovery and application availability in the cloud if the physical location of a business is disabled or damaged from a storm or other catastrophe. Using Arcserve’s Unified Data Protection (UDP) software, the appliances combine flash-accelerated deduplicated storage, server processing and high-speed networking with highly redundant hardware and cloud services that allow customers to quickly spin up copies of physical and virtual systems directly on the appliance or on private or public clouds to get their operations back to normal.

Arcserve’s Oussama El-Hilali

“With this new Appliance Series, we’re removing the ‘do-it-yourself’ complexity of orchestrating hybrid disaster recovery,” Oussama El-Hilali, vice president of products at Arcserve, told Channel Futures. “By bundling heterogeneous software, high redundancy hardware and cloud services, we’ve created a product that prevents companies from having to piecemeal different solutions together to successfully deploy a hybrid strategy, ultimately saving them time and money — and probably few headaches.”

The company received direct feedback from customers and partners asking for a more efficient approach to multitier data protection, he said. “So we made sure that was a priority with our new generation of appliances. This new series is particularly unique because it allows companies to spin up copies of virtual machines directly on-appliance. However, there are some cases where on-appliance recovery won’t work – like if a data center is lost in a flood, fire or other natural disaster. In that case, our appliances also allow companies to recover by running applications in virtual machines from the cloud.”

El-Hilali said the idea behind the new appliances was to reduce the number of vendors that customers have to work with by providing them with an all-in-one product to solve disaster recovery scenarios for users.

“The ability to spin up copies of physical and virtual systems directly on the appliance and in private, public and Arcserve clouds is really the key differentiator here” compared to previous versions of the appliances, he said. “Another differentiator is that the new Appliance Series offers twice the effective capacity as previous models – up to 504 TBs of data per appliance and can manage up to 6 PBs through a single interface.”

Arcserve appliances include integrated on-appliance and cloud-based disaster recovery with up to 20 CPU cores and 768GB RAM; deduplication ratios up to 20:1 with WAN-optimized replication to private and public clouds such as the Arcserve Cloud, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Eucalyptus and Rackspace; high redundancy hardware with dual CPUs, SSDs, power supplies, HDDs and RAM; and increased reliability with onsite hardware support. The appliances are easy to install and can be configured in less than 15 minutes, according to the company. Arcserve has about 1,000 channel partners in North America.

Pete Greco, the vice president of sales and technology for Productive Corp.,  a Minneapolis-based VAR specializing in security and backup for midmarket clients, told Channel Futures that his company has been a partner with Arcserve for more than 15 years and has been working with …

… their appliances since their first release.

Productive Corp.’s Pete Greco

“They have really been able to innovate with the technology and the partner program is really solid,” said Greco. “The new 9000 series appliances have really opened the capacity capabilities so that we can meet the growing storage needs for our midmarket clients.”

Productive Corp.’s customers have been satisfied as well, said Greco. “I think our clients do really like the functionality of UDP [software used by the appliances], our retention rate on renewals is high and this is attributable to a comprehensive feature set.  Plus, I think the interface is relatively easy to use and navigate.”

For customers, the appliances work well, he said. “The product works great. It is very configurable to meet the needs of our clients on both low end and high end. Our clients who just need basic functionality feel like they can use the product with ease and stay on top of their backups, while our clients with a more advanced requirement feel like all the features from Instant Recovery to High Availability give them the capability to meet their SLAs.”

The latest appliance series will help Productive continue to serve its own customers efficiently, said Greco. “The new offering is great, but where we have always had success with Arcserve is its flexibility to work with any gear. We don’t ever really see situations where Arcserve won’t play with a tape device, or a SAN or NAS. This flexibility allows our clients to continue using it even as they change that gear out.”

Phil Goodwin, an analyst with IDC, said the latest appliance series devices will make it easier for companies to improve their disaster recovery operations. “By bundling disaster recovery with its appliance offering, Arcserve is pivoting from competitive approaches to provide a turnkey path to application availability,” said Goodwin. “This approach simplifies disaster recovery and makes better utilization of infrastructure resources.”