Got the Backup Exec Blues?

A New Approach to Your IT Infrastructure

Backup Exec is one of the best known legacy products in the market. But, in this case, that might actually hinder rather than help it. The fact is, when people have long been used to doing things a particular way, it’s hard to pivot and take a fresh approach. However, the reality is that Backup Exec is a complex family of products that operate using separate consoles, whereas Arcserve didn’t retrofit a legacy product into a new era.

Instead, we spent over five million development hours designing a user-agnostic solution that’s entirely new, based on modern IT infrastructures and the challenges associated with protecting them. Our platform, Arcserve UDP, is the only solution of its kind to truly unify data protection across multi-platform cloud, virtual and physical environments, with the scalability to never need another data protection solution. Our customers easily turn on capabilities without burdensome forklift upgrades, such as support for public and private clouds, protection for remote and branch offices (ROBO), high availability for full system availability, and disaster recovery for business-critical applications, among others. Oh, and if you’re a Lotus Notes user, we still have you covered.

Immediate Recovery, Not Wait-and-See

Built-in, image-based backup is a game changer for data protection, and no one knows this better than Arcserve. When our engineers designed instant virtual machine recovery, we knew that “one size doesn’t fit all,” which is why we made sure it was flexible with unique features for cross-hypervisor conversion and automated virtual machine failover. These, among many other reasons, illustrate why our high availability technology has quickly become the standard for Windows availability, and gives peace of mind to thousands of customers worldwide. In contrast, Backup Exec finally just announced its instant virtual machine solution; a capability Arcserve customers have long been enjoying to ensure data availability when it matters the most.

Instant Cloud Availability

Since the advent of virtual machines, nothing has impacted the backup space more than the public cloud. That’s why Arcserve UDP was purposefully designed to protect not only virtual and physical servers (with deep support for Windows and Linux-based applications), but also private and public clouds including Amazon, Azure, Eucalyptus and Rackspace.

Our customers enjoy enterprise-ready features such as: the ability to leverage AWS Cloud as a DR site and copy recovery points to AWS S3, virtual standby for Windows to AWS EC2, P2V and V2V failover, non-disruptive DR testing with application-level recovery, and much more.

On the other hand, Backup Exec still isn’t cloud-ready. It recently introduced its support for copying backup images to Azure, which is great, but something we consider the bare minimum for public cloud support.

Built with Big Data in Mind

It can be argued that data deduplication is one of most important capabilities for a modern data protection solution because when developed right, this technology can massively reduce storage footprints by up to 95% and subsequently, the associated storage costs. Arcserve engineers placed a premium on this capability by uniquely combining multiple data reduction technologies into Arcserve UDP, which have outperformed every other vendor in both customer environments and a variety of lab-run tests.

To match this performance, Backup Exec would require a complete re-design; you can’t simply “bolt-on” a deduplication appliance or add it to an existing legacy backup solution. Well, you can, but it won’t come anywhere close in performance or usability.

Better Technology Yields Better Results

We guarantee data availability with high-performance capabilities that make managing complex data truly effortless. Our agnostic architecture enables users to protect to and from any target, with built-in features such as: instant VM recovery and virtual standby (V2V, P2V, V2P), enterprise storage array snapshot support, instant bare metal restore, detailed SLA reporting, automated recovery point testing, automatic protection of newly added VMware VMs, and fully-integrated snapshot support for Nimble Storage and HPE 3PAR arrays —to name a few.

While Backup Exec continues to play “catch-up” with a long overdue new GUI, famously late support for VMware and Hyper-V image-based backup, and exceedingly late support of platforms such as Windows Server 2012, we see features like these as the bare minimum.