CA ARCserve Backup r16

CA’s ARCserve Backup r16 aims to amalgamate disk, tape and cloud backup into a single product. Dave Mitchell puts it through its paces in the lab to see if it has every data protection angle covered.

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IT Pro Verdict

As long term users of ARCserve, we’ve always found it provides a very good range of data protection tools for the price and is particularly easy to use. This latest version adds essential support for cloud storage, backup features for virtualised environments are good and value is increased considerably by the integral data deduplication.

ITPRO Recommended award

This latest release is focussed on protecting virtualised environments, includes integral data archiving plus synthetic full backups and can manage ARCserve D2D servers from the main management console.

We installed the primary server components on a Broadberry dual X5560 Xeon server running Windows Server 2008 R2. Existing users of ARCserve will be pleased to know the Manager Console design hasn't changed so you get a backup wizard on first contact and a navigation bar pops up when requested to provide easy access to the various functions.

CA's focus on cloud storage introduces D2D2C (disk-to-disk-to-cloud) backup with support for services such as Amazon Web Services and Eucalyptus. It's configured from the Manager console where you create a cloud connection to your chosen provider and associate it with virtual storage devices which are links to cloud folders.

ARCserve

ARCserve has extensive support for virtual servers and can now back up to cloud storage providers

From the ARCserve Device Manager, you can browse, erase and format cloud folders. However, they cannot be used for standard backup copy operations. At present, ARCserve allows them to be used as a target for data migration as part of a disk staging job hence the D2D2C concept.

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.