The majority of organizations are not fully confident in their ability to recover data and workloads in the event of an outage. This is due in part to legacy practices of using a myriad of point product solutions to address backup and disaster recovery needs – which adds complexity, reduces visibility and increases vulnerability points. As organizations rely on a growing number of workloads and also on their data for critical, day-to-day business operations, it is necessary for IT to take stronger control over their disaster recovery infrastructure through a more unified approach.
Because business continuity is expensive to deliver, an approach that tiers service levels based on the criticality of the application and that also integrates both on and off-site resources is necessary. Mission-critical applications require the highest levels of availability with near instantaneous recovery, while secondary storage workloads require only more straightforward backups and can afford longer recovery times. A full failover to a secondary site or to the cloud might be overkill in the face of more efficient onsite recoveries. As a result, an approach that converges availability, disaster recovery and backup can help organizations ensure appropriate levels of business continuity while still controlling their costs.
Arcserve Appliance 9000 Series
For its part, Arcserve is converging disaster recovery, backup and application availability for the midmarket via its new Arcserve 9000 appliance. The appliance was designed to provide more affordable disaster recovery, to increase scalability, and to simplify support for hardware, software and cloud services – especially when compared to using multiple point solutions.
From a disaster recovery perspective, the appliance offers up to 20 CPU cores and 768 GB of RAM. Unlike many competing offerings, the appliance can host applications during a server or storage system outage. The client doesn’t need to purchase additional standby hardware with the new Arcserve solution. According to Arcserve, dozens of copies of physical and virtual systems may be spun up directly on the appliance. RAM may be expanded in eight of the 11 new models to be able to run more hosts in the event of a failure. Meanwhile, cloud disaster recovery-as-a-service may be added on for integration with offsite copies, as may high availability in the form of CDP-based failover and failback.
In terms of scalability, the system can support up to 504 TB of effective capacity (assuming a 20:1 deduplication ratio). It can manage up to 6 PB of backups. To expand capacity, additional drives simply need to be loaded into the bay, according to Arcserve; there is no need for an engineer to guide the customer through the process.
Because it is a singular box that integrates with cloud services, it is simpler to install and configure. Meanwhile, Arcserve offers both four hour and next business day on-site support. Analytics provides a view into capacity and performance utilization to help IT managers make better decisions about which appliance to route jobs.
To increase the system’s reliability and performance, Arcserve is now using a leading, U.S.-based server hardware provider as opposed to commodity alternatives. Also, the 9000 appliances may be deployed in a 2U model for high redundancy of power supplies, SSDs, etc.
StorageSwiss Take
Patchwork, disjointed solutions create high risk via multiple points of failure and add substantial complexity, especially for smaller organizations with limited IT staff. Midmarket companies will find value in the more singular vantage point and control of disaster recovery for on and off-premises resources enabled by the Arcserve 9000. They should be aware, however, that jobs still need to be manually routed across systems – and that Arcserve’s core software platforms (UDP, Arcserve Backup and RHA) have yet to be centralized under a single user interface (but this is on the roadmap). Competitively speaking, the ability to run disaster recovery directly on the appliance is a key differentiator compared to peers.
Senior Analyst, Krista Macomber produces analyst commentary and contributes to a range of client deliverables including white papers, webinars and videos for Storage Switzerland. She has a decade of experience covering all things storage, data center and cloud infrastructure, including: technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her previous experience includes leading the IT infrastructure practice of analyst firm Technology Business Research, and leading market intelligence initiatives for media company TechTarget.
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