CA Adds In-Line De-Dupe to DR Suite

CA rolled out major upgrades to parts of its CA Recovery Management software suite, adding data de-duplication capabilities for backing up data and virtual machines, a new one-step file recovery process, and better storage resource management features that provide more detail on physical and virtual storage assets.

The software suite includes new versions of ARCserve Backup, XOsoft High Availability, and XOsoft Replication business continuity and disaster recovery software, among 13 new and enhanced products that company introduced.

CA has added in-line data de-duplication to ARCserve Backup to reduce the amount of data that needs to be backed up and to de-dupe virtual machine backups for popular hypervisors. The company also has added a method to verify that data that has been backed up can be recovered to help customers test their disaster recovery systems. It also added an easier way to recover files and enhanced its storage resource management capabilities with improved reporting and "proactive problem avoidance" features. Another new feature is password management for encryption keys to ensure passwords aren't lost.

The company also released a new version of its XOsoft High Availability XOsoft Replication software, which customers use to provide business continuity and disaster recovery. New features include high availability for VMware vCenter Server and single-instance host level replication for Microsoft Hyper-V, additional protection for Windows system state and registry synchronization, replication for Unix and Linux systems, replication and high availability for Microsoft SharePoint, and automated disaster recovery testing.

"Customers can use our recovery features to test their disaster recovery plans by starting up a copy of an application on a replicated server and running it against the backed up data to test it," says Frank Jablonski, senior director of product marketing for the recovery management and data modeling business unit of CA. The company also has added "continuous data protection with rewind" to let customers that get infected with viruses or worms or are suffering from data corruption to rollback systems to a point before the problem hit. "The problem with replication is that it also replicates bad things like worms and viruses, so this lets them get back to a good point in time."Jablonski says CA will continue to work with data de-duplication partners like ExaGrid and Data Domain, but that customers had asked for data de-duplication capabilities integrated with the company's backup product. "We developed this ourselves, and it takes data coming from the production server and de-dupes it on the fly as it travels to backup storage. We do it that way so as not to take performance from the production server", he says. It can do a global de-dupe across servers and produce data reduction ratios of 20 to 1, Jablonski notes.

Many of the new features are being added at no extra change, and CA plans to offer suites of software based on server types, with bundles for file servers, database servers, virtualized servers, and others. It also is launching a marketing and promotion campaign that bundles replication software with backup applications and makes them available at a discount.

Lauren Whitehouse, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said in a statement that "IT organizations are looking for optimized and cost effective ways to maintain and manage copies of data for business continuity and disaster recovery. CA's new Recovery Management release provides backup and replication for physical and virtual environments that meets these needs, incorporating key technologies like native data deduplication, SRM, and file-level recovery from image-level backups in server virtualization environments."

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