CA Claims Backup Record

Computer Associates International (NYSE: CA) kicked off its annual user conference in Florida this week by announcing some new backup and recovery software that it claims smashes all records for online backup.

It even has the results of tests performed by analyst and advisory firm Doculabs Inc. to prove it. But there's a catch: CA paid Doculabs $30,000 to perform the tests, raising a question mark over their objectivity.

CA's new software is called BrightStor Enterprise Backup, and the company showed it off at the user conference by demonstrating it backing up Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) databases on servers from Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) and Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HWP).

The demonstration, over a Fibre Channel network, showed sustained backup throughputs greater than 1.5 terabytes per hour on the Solaris 8 Operating Environment (OE), and greater than 1 terabyte per hour on HP-UX.

This appears to beat the previous record holder,

Legato Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTO). Its Networker product offers sustained throughputs of 1.3 terabytes per hour.Legato was unavailable for comment.

BrightStor Enterprise Backup is the first product in CA's new BrightStor storage line. It plans to introduce more software modules under the BrightStor umbrella for managing SAN equipment and applications.

CA also demonstrated the new software on EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) Symmetrix storage systems. And it said it will work with Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) to create a pre-tested SAN configuration, incorporating BrightStor and Brocade SAN switches (see Brocade, CA Expand Partnership).

Jo Maitland, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch http://www.byteandswitch.com