Dan's Take

Data Protection for the Mid-market

Arcserve has a varied history.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 05/10/2016

Christophe Bertrand, VP of Product Marketing at Arcserve (formally part of CA), dropped by to provide a company overview and to discuss what the company is doing to provide unified data protection to the mid-market and decentralized companies.

Arcserve is a name with a rich history in the IT market. I remember them when they were called Cheyenne Software and their primary product was Arcserve, a backup product that supported many UNIX operating environments. (At that time, by the way, the research firm IDC was tracking nearly 40 different UNIX products from as many vendors.)

While I was part of Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) Intel/UNIX group, Cheyenne and DEC worked together to provide data protection solutions to our joint customers. We also worked with Symantec and a number of smaller firms that offered products that focused specifically on users of Intel-based systems running UNIX from the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO); this isn't to be confused with the SCO Group, which was promoting the technology later.

In 1996, the company was acquired by CA (then Computer Associates). The technology continued to evolve and was highly regarded by customers using it but, the name Arcserve slowly faded from view because CA would always lead with its own name. CA also had a tendency to create new terms, which it hoped would become standard buzz words, but seldom did.

In 2014, Arcserve was acquired by Marlin Equity Partners and has been spreading its wings ever since. At this point, the company's products are being used by 45,000 end users in more than 150 countries through 7,500 distributors, resellers and service providers around the world.

Dan's Take: An Interesting Competitor in a Crowded Market
Although Arcserve offers quite a comprehensive selection of data backup, archival storage and data replication products designed to provide data protection, it faces stiff competition from many other suppliers. Like the others, the company's technology is available in various forms, including: a server appliance; a cloud storage and disaster recovery service; tape backup software; and high availability software.

When asked why companies would select Arcserve over the many other companies offering similar products, Bertrand said the primary reason customers come to Arcserve is its ability to provide enterprise-class protection features, including deduplication and replication, in a simple, easy-to-use form that can be easily managed by mid-market companies.

The company's thoughts about protecting virtual servers using either local or cloud-based storage are pretty interesting. I'd suggest visiting them on the Web and learning more if your organization uses either VMware's vSphere or Microsoft's Hyper-V.