Arcserve Integrates New Arcserve Cloud Into Data Protection Solution

Arcserve on Tuesday expanded its data protection portfolio with Arcserve Cloud, the company's first cloud service.

The Arcserve Cloud is the first major release from Minneapolis-based Arcserve since its split a year ago from parent company CA.

Arcserve Cloud is totally integrated with the vendor's data protection solutions for long-term backup and archiving, said CEO Mike Crest.

[Related: CA's Arcserve Spinout: A New Channel-Focused Data Protection Vendor]

"This lets us give customers a complete solution," Crest told CRN.

Arcserve Cloud features full disaster recovery-as-a-service capabilities, the ability to provide monthly billing, source-side deduplication, and virtual stand-by infrastructure in the cloud, Crest said. "So if things go bump in the night, customers can spin up in the cloud seamlessly," he said.

Historically, Arcserve has worked with third-party providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Cloudian to provide the cloud piece of its data protection solution, Crest said.

But because Arcserve Cloud is integrated with the rest of Arcserve's solution, it is now easier for customers and partners to use, he said. "Customers can manage the cloud across Arcserve itself," he said. "There's no need to stitch different services together. This honors our commitment to the channel."

Crest admitted that Arcserve Cloud is built on third-party cloud technology, but he declined to identify who that partner is. "But it's a best-in-class offering," he said. "It provides the needed utilities I mentioned above."

The new Arcserve Cloud is a good move for the vendor's existing customer base, said Chuck Iten, marketing manager at Productive, a Minneapolis-based solution provider and long-term Arcserve channel partner.

"This really keeps Arcserve competitive," Iten told CRN. "We have been telling Arcserve for some time that it is missing an opportunity by not having an integrated cloud in its solution. A lot of customers are moving off tape and want an integrated solution. And Now Arcserve has it."

The Arcserve Cloud provides midmarket customers with availability, easy management and off-site disaster recovery, Iten said. "If you are a midmarket company, it's expensive to get data off-site," he said. "Access to a cloud makes it easy and affordable."

Iten said Arcserve's spin-off from CA was something that needed to be done. "Arcserve is now making a lot of changes we have been asking for for a long time," he said. "These are changes it couldn't do while a part of 'the machine.' Arcserve needed innovation, and to combine its various products into a solution."

Christophe Bertrand, vice president for product marketing management at Arcserve, said there are several use cases for the Arcserve Cloud.

These include off-site disaster recovery, which will be initially offered to Arcserve's Unified Data Protection appliance customers before being available to non-Arcserve appliances.

It also includes the ability to move data off-site; the ability to recover data to a data protection appliance or to any physical or virtual machine; to leverage virtual servers in the cloud for disaster recovery testing; and to archive data with different retention policies, Bertrand said.

PUBLISHED JULY 15, 2015