Data protection and recovery vendor Arcserve LLC, of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, has rolled out a new edition of its Unified Data Protection (UDP) solution offering simplified installation capabilities, instant virtual machine and bare metal restore options, and augmented support for Linux end points, among other features.
Ease of use and end-to-end functionality have been among UDP’s top selling points since its debut in May 2014. Targeted at midmarket businesses, which Arcserve defines as companies with roughly 250 to 2,500 employees, the solution combines backup, de-duplication, replication, and high availability capabilities in one integrated package.
“We really provide customers with enterprise-like or enterprise-class features but the usability of an SMB product,” says Christophe Bertrand, Arcserve’s vice president of product marketing.
Additions to UDP in the new version 6 release include:
- A Wizard-driven setup process aimed at simplifying and consolidating installation of UDP’s data protection, backup, and high availability components
- Storage array-level hardware snapshotting of both physical and virtual servers
- Zero-wait recoveries of protected VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines, on either a virtual-to-virtual or virtual-to-physical basis
- New tape management functionality that allows the many companies that still use tape-based storage, primarily for archiving purposes, to schedule and monitor tape data protection and migration processes centrally through the UDP console
- Support for Windows 10 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2016
- Enhanced protection for Linux devices, including support for the same de-duplication, replication, and archiving features that UDP already provided for Windows clients in previous editions
That last feature has become an increasingly common requirement within midmarket environments, most of which have at least some Linux devices these days, according to LD Weller, Arcserve’s senior director of product management.
“You have pockets of Linux almost everywhere,” he says.
Today’s UDP update is the latest development in a busy couple of years for Arcserve. Founded in 1990 and acquired by CA Technologies six years later, Arcserve split off from its parent company in August 2014, becoming an independent business owned by Los Angeles-based global investment firm Marlin Equity Partners.
“We are sort of the largest overnight startup in our space,” Bertrand says.
They’ve been moving at a startup’s pace too. In the last year alone, Arcserve has introduced a new partner program and channel-only distribution model, launched its Arcserve Cloud offsite backup offering, and unveiled a new appliance-based edition of UDP that complements the original software-based version. Don’t expect Arcserve to slow down any time soon either, Bertrand adds.
“We keep building on it,” he says of UDP. “We’re not stopping.”
