CA Backup Plays Favorites

Computer Associates International Inc. (CA)'s (NYSE: CA) BrightStor Enterprise Backup 10.5 could come straight out of George Orwell's Animal Farm: "All data is equal, but some data is more equal than others."

CA says that besides improving performance and management, the latest version of the software helps companies give preferential treatment to their valuable and business-critical data.

BrightStor Enterprise Backup 10.5, which the company started shipping last week, provides policy-based management functions that allow storage administrators to assign more resources for protecting important data, like sensitive personnel records, and fewer resources for stuff like email messages. This discrimination can help companies avoid spending tens of thousands of dollars backing up data that's worth just a fraction of that, according to CA.

The new software also includes CA's BrightStor portal technology, which provides common management and cross-server reporting for all enterprise storage resources (see CA Ships BrightStor Portal).

"Companies can centrally manage, from a single window, their entire backup environment," says Ed Cooper, product manager for BrightStor Solutions.Industry analysts say the software's ability to distinguish between high- and low-priority data for backup gives users a potentially powerful tool. "Risk mitigation is very important, but companies shouldn't spend a lot of money backing up data that doesn't need it," says Aberdeen Group Inc. analyst David Hill.

Still, CA continues to lag far behind Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) and Legato Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTO) when it comes to market share. Cooper, however, insists that CA's traditional focus on the mainframe gives the company an advantage that purely storage-focused companies don't have. "CA is more than just a storage business," he says.

The fact that market leader Veritas recently expanded into managing server resources as well as storage might have some enterprise management software vendors worried, but Cooper asserts CA is ahead in terms of functionality (see Veritas Moves up the Stack). "What they're announcing is kind of a 'me-too' thing," he says. "What they hope to deliver in the next couple of years, we've been delivering for a while."

More than 30 companies have been beta testing BrightStor Enterprise Backup 10.5, code-named Jaguar, for the past few months, and CA says it has already signed on about eight paying customers.

Two early adopters of BrightStor Enterprise Backup 10.5 -- both already CA customers -- say the new software has greatly simplified managing their backup. Mohamad Alkazaz, the telecom manager at Saint-Gobain Crystals & Detectors, a manufacturer of radiation-detection instruments and photonic components, says he's using the software to simplify restoring data from email and database servers. "Now we're using the agents to back up individual mailboxes," he says, adding that the company has also started backing up database tables separately. "You just restore what you need."Most impressive, Alkazaz says, is that the policy agents are forward- and backward-compatible. "You can use agents for emails and databases designed for previous versions." Prior to moving to 10.5, Crystals & Detectors used CA's ARCserve Backup 9.

Greg Petras, systems analyst at electronic trading technology company Nyfix Inc., has also recently started migrating to BrightStor Enterprise Backup 10.5 from 10.0. He agrees its backward-compatibility is one of its best features: "We don't have to upgrade all of our agents at once. They're compatible."

In addition to integrating with other CA management products, the upgraded backup software works with a range of third-party offerings, including snapshot image technology from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT).

CA says the software is available for all major server platforms, including Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, and Windows NT; major Unix derivatives and Linux distributions; NetWare; and Open VMS. It also performs backup and recovery functions for specific applications, including Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange, Oracle databases, Lotus Notes, Sybase, SAP R/3, and IBM DB2.

BrightStor Enterprise Backup 10.5 is priced anywhere from $4,000 to $25,000, depending on the type of server it's running on. Pricing for the different agents is extra and ranges from $295 to $10,000.Eugénie Larson, Reporter, Light Reading