CA Unveils Hybrid Data Protection Service For SMBs

10 Important Cloud Apps For SMBs

CA Technologies on Thursday launched a new data protection service for small and midsized businesses that lets them protect their data onsite and in the cloud.

Called CA ARCserve D2D On Demand, the service pairs CA ARCserve for local data protection with a service into the Windows Azure cloud for disaster recovery. SMBs are an ideal target for the CA service since most businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees don’t have full-time skilled IT personnel to administer and manage a data protection service.

CA has stepped out with the D2D On Demand service and will sell it through the channel to managed service providers, value-added resellers, and end-user organizations.

Since ARCserve D2D On Demand is also a service, it lets cash-strapped businesses used operational expenses instead of capital expenses.

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In an actual implementation, a customer would use ARCserve D2D On Demand to back up data to a local disk. An image of that data is then shuttled to the cloud. Using a technology call Infinite Incremental, after the initial data upload, only changed data is stored in the cloud.

Users can do file-level recovery from the cloud as well as granular recovery of emails from onsite data. File versioning is supported, as is encryption of data in flight and at rest.

Further, users can schedule when data is backed up, monitor the number of machines being backed up, and administer the service account.

CA ARCserve D2D On Demand supports VMware and Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization systems.

CA’s ARCserve D2D On Demand service is unique in that it offers a hybrid data protection solution, in contrast to services such as Symantec’s backupexec.cloud, Carbonite, or MozyPro, which provide only offsite data protection. Further, the licensing model of CA ARCserve D2D On Demand differs from other services in that the amount of storage capacity used is pooled among users--if a company purchases 500GB of storage, for instance, they can allocate that storage as they want instead of just having a specific amount per user.

CA ARCserve D2D On Demand protects Windows servers and desktops, and offers monthly or annual subscription licensing that includes 25GB of Windows Azure cloud storage per protected machine. The subscription pricing for a Windows Server is $607.92 per year, or $50.66 monthly. To protect a desktop or laptop with CA ARCserve D2D On Demand costs $207.74 per year, or $17.30 per month. Additional storage capacity can be purchased.

Deni Connor is founding analyst for Storage Strategies NOW, an industry analyst firm that focuses on storage, virtualization, and servers.

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