CA Strengthens Its Recovery Management Portfolio

Data protection for business continuity, including both local recovery from operational problems and remote disaster recovery, is in the midst of a sea change. Vendors are adding functions, features, and products to what was once simply backup/recovery software to provide more widely focused recovery management solutions. Recovery management takes a broader perspective on what it takes to not only protect data but, even more importantly, to recover that data if necessary in order to enable disaster-impacted applications to fully access and use their data.

In a recent global study conducted by TheInfoPro, CA found that enterprises may be willing to migrate from their existing backup/restore software if a broader recovery management approach were available that offered attractive benefits. Not so surprisingly, CA recently announced new capabilities for recovery management that serve as an illustration of what is happening in the recovery management segment of the data protection market today.

The CA Recovery Management announcement includes:

CA ARCserve Backup 12.5 - CA announced a number of new features for ARCserve, such as increased virtualization support, but for illustration purposes, data deduplication and monitoring and reporting support are key. Data deduplication is a particularly hot topic in data protection, since these solutions save only one full back-up copy of the data, plus all the changes that take place afterward. This is in contrast to the traditional method of storing multiple, full backups over time as well as any necessary incremental backups. If all those backups are stored on disk (as opposed to tape) the process can become quite expensive. In short, data deduplication saves disk space, improves backup efficiency and reliability, and improves the ability to restore data more quickly.

Consequently, the free inclusion of data deduplication within CA ARCserve offers a financial and administrative boon to companies that want to do disk-to-disk backup. By comparison, if a customer chooses to use a virtual tape library (VTL) for disk-to-disk backup, the customer would pay to use the VTL vendor's data deduplication software.

CA also offers data protection management capabilities within ARCserve Backup 12.5. Traditionally, backup/restore software has focused on fundamental backup/recovery processes. The software usually did not monitor or report on what was happening within the environment during backup or recovery process, leaving those issues to data protection management software, such Bocada and WysDM (which has since been acquired by EMC). Understanding why backups or recoveries fail (or might be in the process of failing) is important. So getting proactive recommendations, such as correcting the "shoe shining," which results from the improper streaming of backup data to tape, provides critical insight into ensuring that tape drives perform properly.

ARCserve supports monitoring and supporting via a dashboard that displays key performance information, and uses storage resource management (SRM) functionality to track and report on physical and virtual components of the environment, including production servers, memory, networks and storage. The nice thing is that the information can help administrators react to problems that have already occurred, but can also be used to spot potential service level impacting events before they occur and proactively implement corrective action. The integration of monitoring/reporting capabilities in ARCserve Backup 12.5 should prove worthwhile to both backup customers and their storage administrators.

CA XOsoft High Availability 12.5 and CA XOsoft Replication 12.5 - Complementing ARCserve Backup 12.5 are two products; 1) CA XOsoft High Availability 12.5, for local recovery from operational problems (high availability), and, 2) CA XOsoft Replication 12.5, for remote recovery from disasters (replication). These complementary capabilities are important for so-called zero data loss solutions such as continuous data protection, which is gaining popularity because of its ability to restore data from any point in time. CA's announcement includes numerous enhancements for these products, including support for virtualized environments and Microsoft SharePoint 2007.

However, another issue of import is automated or non-disruptive disaster recovery (DR) (i.e., no rebooting of servers). Automated DR has been around for awhile, and is now available for both CA XOsoft products at no extra charge. That may not seem like much, but is really a big deal. Why? Because proper DR testing (because it tends to be disruptive to normal processing, because it is complex, and because it is an IT administrator burden) is something that many IT organizations ignore and would like to sweep under the rug. Anything that makes effective DR testing feasible and easier is to be welcomed and CA's decision to incorporate these capabilities means that companies are much more likely to gain the advantage of proper DR testing.

In addition, CA is offering an "X-tra Value Pack" bundle for CA ARCserve that incorporates CA XOsoft replication, but not the high availability product.

It's an ill wind that blows no good, and continuing economic conditions qualify as an ill wind hurricane. However, one positive result from these challenges is that vendors are working hard to develop and deliver more capabilities for their customers without jacking up the price. CA's new ARCserve and XOsoft solutions highlight how a vendor can accomplish this by integrating data deduplication, monitoring and reporting tools, and a disaster recovery testing capabilities into its recovery management portfolio. We believe CA's customers should welcome these solutions, and that competing vendors may consider how a similar approach could enhance their own offerings.

- David Hill is principal of Mesabi Group LLC, which focuses on helping organizations make their complex storage, storage management, and interrelated IT infrastructure decisions easier by making the choices simpler and clearer to understand.

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