KuppingerCole: Arcserve Delivers Unified Data Resilience

The introduction to the KuppingerCole Report covering Arcserve unified data resilience, written by Distinguished Analyst Mike Small, states the problem clearly: “Data resilience solutions are an essential element of business continuity plans, and, as organizations go through digital transformation and become more dependent on their IT services, the need for data resilience has grown.”

The report notes that these solutions need to support hybrid multi-cloud IT service delivery environments and take advantage of these modern infrastructures' new capabilities. But these same environments—which typically deliver services from both on-premises and cloud resources—often lead to the use of multiple data protection solutions. That increases management burdens on IT, making a single solution that covers all use cases essential.

An Always-On Architecture Is Crucial

The report points out that today’s digital business services demand an always-on architecture. That means ensuring continuous availability for critical infrastructure with continuous data replication so you can be confident of business continuity if individual elements fail. That requires investments in backup products, disaster recovery services, and immutable storage solutions to ensure data resilience. The introduction concludes, “It is vital that the chosen approach is adequate for the modern digitally transformed hybrid IT environment.”

Complete Range of Data Resilience Solutions

The report describes Arcserve as providing a complete range of data resilience solutions that deliver comprehensive data protection, data management, and disaster recovery capabilities. These address the business continuity challenges for businesses ranging in size from SMBs to large enterprises, helping to manage and protect critical business data across systems and applications, both on-premises and in the cloud.

Key Data Resilience and Disaster Recovery Capabilities

The report points out that KuppingerCole looks for specific key capabilities in data resilience and disaster recovery solutions. These include:

Protected Data

To enable fast service restoration, the solution must support many data types and snapshots of physical servers, virtual machines (VMs), cloud VMs, and containers. As outlined in the report, Arcserve data resilience solutions protect virtual machines (VMs) sold by leading vendors. The solutions also offer options for agentless and agent-based backups, with ransomware protection, and backup and recovery for leading databases, file server platforms, and storage architectures.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Protection

Applications and data in commonly used IaaS cloud services should also be protected. The Arcserve UDP agent for Windows can be deployed on Amazon EC2 VMs. The agent protects the operating system (OS) and applications supported by physical machines and VMs on EC2 and Microsoft Azure.

SaaS Protection

The report notes that SaaS data protection requires a solution that works across all your SaaS services and supports various SaaS data types and custom retention schemes. There are two Arcserve offerings for SaaS data protection. Arcserve SaaS Backup offers complete cloud-to-cloud backup for data stored in Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 Azure AD, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, and Google Workspace. Arcserve UDP and appliances provide comprehensive on-premises protection for Microsoft 365, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business.

Storage Options

KuppingerCole says you should have a choice as to how and where protected data is stored. Arcserve solutions include onsite and offsite backup and restore with built-in cloud disaster recovery (DR). Arcserve also offers on-premises, object-based, immutable network-attached storage (NAS) with a scale-out architecture that lets you add one drive at a time or multiple nodes in a cluster. The report also notes that Arcserve solutions include inline deduplication, compression, continuous data protection, and encryption at rest.  

Security

Data security is paramount, so the report says to ensure the data in transit to and from your backup location is protected. The report notes that Arcserve products include a wide range of security features, from role-based administration (RBA), encryption of protected data in flight, and protections against deletion or alteration with immutable cloud storage using AWS S2 Object Lock. Integration with Sophos Intercept X Advanced for Server protects Arcserve UDP recovery point servers (RPS) and the management console against a wide range of threats. And Arcserve OneXafe delivers immutable storage for on-premises ransomware protection.

Disaster Recovery

If you get hit by a disaster, recovery is all that matters. KuppingerCole highlights that Arcserve Cloud Hybrid disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) provides failover capabilities for on-premises servers, while Arcserve UDP Virtual Standby lets you maintain virtual copies of your systems on Nutanix AHV, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Amazon AWS EC2, and Microsoft Azure. The product’s Instant VM lets you spin up backups as virtual machines on the local backup server or any VMWare or Hyper-V host.

KuppingerCole’s Closing Thoughts

Here’s how Mike Small summarized the strengths and challenges of Arcserve products:

“Arcserve has a mature set of data resilience solutions with a strong user base. These solutions provide comprehensive capabilities that can satisfy many use cases across organizations of different sizes, from SMBs to large enterprises. The addition of the OneXafe storage appliances from StorageCraft strengthens these capabilities, providing increased flexibility, energy efficiency as well as added security.

The solutions can be deployed as software, hardware, and virtual appliances, as well as within cloud services. The solutions support agentless protection of VMware, Hyper-V, and Nutanix deployments. They provide integrated automatic deduplication of the protected data and support a choice of storage options, including traditional tape backup as well as cloud. The solutions also offer resilience for data deployed in both IaaS and SaaS, covering the major hyperscale clouds and Microsoft 365.

The Arcserve unified data resilience solutions provide very strong capabilities to secure the protected data against unauthorized access as well as from hardware failures human errors, and cyber-attacks. These include capabilities to encrypt the protected data before it leaves the customer, together with immutable storage to protect the data against malicious changes. They are also integrated with Sophos X to provide protection against a wide range of cyber-threats.”

Read the complete report here. To learn more about Arcserve solutions, find an expert Arcserve technology partner.