Arcserve Acquires Zetta, Broadens Unified Data Protection Suite

**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting merger and acquisition news from April.**

Arcserve on Tuesday announced the acquisition of Zetta, the cloud data protection and disaster-recovery solutions company, and in the process outlined plans for an expanded product portfolio beginning with direct-to-cloud disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and backup as a service (BaaS).

Up until the acquisition, Arcserve’s flagship Unified Data Protection (UDP) product had a hybrid – or two-step – cloud offering: The first required backup to the premises and then backup to the cloud. The new Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct expands the UDP product suite.

Arcserve’s Rick Parker

“With the acquisition of Zetta, our direct-to-cloud offering is for any place that an organization doesn’t want to install additional equipment, which could be smaller locations, distributed offices, or retail stores, for example,” Rick Parker, chief marketing officer at Arcserve, told us.

Arcserve’s North American partners will be able to sell Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct beginning on Aug. 14, the vendor said, followed by other locations worldwide. Arcserve sells exclusively through channel partners – approximately 7,500 – worldwide. Zetta sold directly, but also through 540 managed service providers (MSPs) — which have been responsible for the bulk of the company’s sales.

The second piece of the road map is the development of a new future disaster-avoidance product that addresses zero tolerance, or more than a few seconds of downtime for business applications such as e-commerce, ERP, logistics and email, and increased risk of IT disasters — both natural disasters and security attacks.

Arcserve, which targets midsize organizations, or companies with 250-2,500 employees, lists five requirements for disaster avoidance: complete and ready-to-use, self-service portal, near-zero data loss, comprehensive protection and affordable pricing.

The critical missing piece is lack of an advanced replication engine that results in losing hours of data, Parker noted.

“The big issue for disaster-recovery vendors out there today is that they can lose a lot of data. They can’t move the data up into the cloud fast enough, leading to hours of data loss — which is unacceptable,” he said.

By combining Arcserve technology with Zetta IP, Arcserve expects to deliver a near-zero data loss recovery point objective (RPO) solution with instant recovery time objective (RTO) for the midmarket in the next 12 months. The vendor said it’s already building out this solution by combining its replication and high-availability engine with its new cloud-first DRaaS offerings and data center IP.

“Over the coming months, we’ll change the game with an affordable, completely seamless solution that will limit customers’ data loss to nearly zero and will support all midmarket platforms, hypervisors, cloud and on-premises, ultimately making DRaaS solutions that lose hours of data a relic of the past,” said Mike Crest, Arcserve CEO.