Extends Leadership in Data Protection Offerings for MSPs With Unmatched Licensing Flexibility, Expanded Technology and New Promotional Resources

ISLANDIA, NY, February 13, 2013—CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) today announced the third major release of its industry-leading Managed Service Provider (MSP) licensing program for CA ARCserve®. With a further simplified licensing structure, new partner enablement resources and an expanded technology portfolio, the CA ARCserve MSP program empowers partners to quickly and cost-efficiently deliver effective, profitable data protection services.

New Remote Virtual Standby, Host-Based VM Backup Replication and Cascading Failover Reduce Business System Downtime

ISLANDIA, NY, February 21, 2013—CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) today announced new enhancements to its CA ARCserve® data protection solution that simplify backup and disaster recovery for physical and virtual server environments, while significantly improving performance, scalability and flexibility.

Rethinking Backup in a Multifaceted World
February 21st, 2013 | Author: Channelnomics Perspectives 
   
It’s hard to believe, but there was a time when backup was essentially a one-to-one exercise…

New archiving frees up expensive primary storage, reduces backup time and improves efficiency, while proactive monitoring and management in a centralized console ensures the integrity and availability of data.

CA ARCserve Backup r16 extends integration with CA ARCserve D2D for improved efficiency and easier administration.

I want to tell a story that, to this day, impresses upon me the importance of solid DR/BC testing.  A customer in Alabama that I spent considerable time with (a very large insurance company) invited me in to talk about their DR/BC solution. In a meeting with the  CEO and his staff, they explained to me that their building, which held about 600 employees, was the primary HQ for the entire company, it was located less than 1/2 of a  mile away from railroad tracks that often carried hazardous materials, is a prime tornado zone, and the building was subject to flooding.  Obviously, DR/BC was an important point for this gentleman.

He explained his process to me as such:

Once every 6 months, without an announcement to anybody, the CEO would personally show up at the building and kick everybody out and lock the doors.  He would then designate about 80% of his IT staff as either “dead” or “unavailable”.  His final step was to issue everybody “gas masks” to simulate, for example, a hazardous material spill from the nearby train tracks.  With these conditions, whoever was left of his IT staff had to get his systems back up and running efficiently in accordance with the previously specified Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives.  He had an alternate data center located a few miles away (problematic, I informed him…too close!) that was used for these tests.

Usually, he told me, the process did not succeed 100%.  A few of the items he mentioned that caused delays or failures:

• Documentation of the entire DR/BC process was inside the building – oops
• The correct tapes could not be retrieved due to internal recording error – oops
• Server rebuilds could not be completed due to missing configurations – oops
• Key people could not participate in the process – oops
• Various other reasons…but you get the idea.

Although they usually weren’t 100% successful, he felt his teams were very well prepared to deal with an actual emergency, and I would have to agree with him on that point.  Most customers give this kind of testing lip service, but rarely take steps to actually go through the process and then do an extensive after action effort to determine what could have been done better.  I tip my hat to this customer!!

In today’s business climate, with data playing an ever increasingly critical role in most business’s success, the ability to recover from any kind of disaster is paramount.  To this day, the process the above customer explained to me, coupled with the fact that he was interested in learning additional testing possibilites, impressed upon me the simple fact that some customers truly “get it”.  For those of you out there that are not doing this kind of testing…why not?  Time?  Money?  System Downtime?  All of these reasons disappear in the face of a true emergency. 

If you are doing this kind of test, you have my sincerest praise.  If you aren’t, I would strongly urge you to look into it, talk with a consultant, research online…there are many, many ways of accomplishing this kind of testing without breaking the bank or actually taking your systems offline.

–PLH–

Your contribution to this critical product test cycle is directly related to the success of the Generally-Available (GA) release of CA Technologies products and helps us to deliver solutions that are ready to meet your real-world requirements.

As a participant in the Beta Program, you will communicate directly with the Beta Research and Development team to investigate and address any reported problems, questions, or comments.

Key Features:

• Cloud Based Protection
  
• File Copy / Archive
  
• Microsoft Exchange Granular Mailbox Recovery
  
• Virtualization – New features & enhancements!
  
• Encryption
  
• Auto Update
  
• Windows Explorer Shell Integration
  
• Copy Recovery Points / Scheduled Export
  
• Ease of Use Enhancements
  
• Performance Enhancements
  
• Centralized Management (Coming Very Soon! Stay Tuned!)
  
• Workstation Support
  
• And much more …..
  

For more information, and to register for the CA ARCserve® D2D r16 for Windows Beta Program, please visit CA ARCserve Beta Center

CA ARCserve® D2D R16 Alpha program

CA Technologies is pleased to invite you to participate in the CA ARCserve® D2D R16 Alpha program. Your participation offers you the ability to validate CA ARCserve® D2D R16 Alpha in your own environment, allowing you to give us feedback on product enhancements, quality, and the Alpha/Beta Program.

Your contribution to this critical product test cycle is directly related to the success of the generally available (GA) release of CA Technologies products and helps us to deliver solutions that are ready to meet your real-world requirements.

Please visit ARCserve.com to participate in the Open Registration for our R16 Alpha Release.

Upon registration, you will be sent an email that details the features included in the R16 release.

Providing Feedback and Getting Support

CA ARCserve®
ALPHA or BETA releases are NOT supported on production environments.  CA Technologies is not responsible for any issues resulting from the use of an ALPHA or BETA version of this product. CA Technologies does not provide live technical support for ALPHA product releases.  BETA product releases may have both live and electronic support options available to submit issues.

We welcome your feedback, so please visit our GETSATISFACTION site or click the GETSATISFACTION link in the product to submit questions to our developers, query our user community, post open issues, request enhancements or review frequently asked questions.

For any other questions on shipping products, please contact your local Sales Specialist or Authorized CA Technologies Reseller. For assistance in the US and Canada, please call +1 800 225-5224.

For international assistance, please navigate to the Worldwide page. Choose your country of interest and click the Contact link on the footer of your homepage. For quality assurance purposes, you may be contacted by your local CA Technologies representative.

Sincerely,

The CA ARCserve® D2D ALPHA Team

© 2011 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies

https://supportconnectw.ca.com/cso/beta/arcsrv16/arcsrv16beta-quest.asp

–PLH–

Question: How do I get the best performance?

Answer: The best performance will be achieved by performing backups and restores over your Fibre or iSCSI SAN instead of via the LAN.  The steps listed below will assist you with the preparation of your VM environment for quicker performance.

A. VMware-specific Steps

     1. Make sure the VMware Proxy can “see” same LUNs as the ESX\ESXi Servers (i.e. visible in Windows Disk Management)

          a. DO NOT perform any Disk Management tasks such as initialize, assign drive letter, or, especially, FORMAT! (I know none of us would ever do that, right?)

     2. Install VDDK version 1.1.1, or later, on the VMware Proxy

     3. Proceed to the steps in section B.

B. Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware Steps

     1. Install the Backup Server (Primary Member or Standalone) and the Agent for Virtual Machines on the VMware Proxy or on the Microsoft Hyper-V Hosts.

     2. Configure the Agent for VMs with the vCenter\ESX\ESXi\Hyper-V information

     3. Use ARCserve Backup Agent Deployment to deliver the Client Agent and the Agent for Virtual Machines to VMs

         a. The Agent Deployment can retrieve a list of the discovered VMs from the ARCserve Database. You just need to provide the authentication information.

You will now be ready to perform your backups and recoveries over the SAN.

Happy VM’ing, and let us know if this post was helpful to you.

It contains a limited version of the SQL Agent that is tailored to only protect databases used by SharePoint.

//Pether Lek

–PLH–

CA ARCserve Backup r15 introduces the Data Mover functionality to speed up your UNIX and Linux Backups.

What is required?

• UNIX and Linux Servers must have SAN connectivity if you will be backing up to a library
  • Otherwise, data can be backed up locally to a File System Device

What is the benefit?

• The Storage Administrator can leverage the SAN bandwidth for backup of large UNIX and Linux Servers instead of the LAN
  • This leads to increased throughput compared to standard backups via the UNIX and Linux Client Agents

Contact your CA Partner Reseller for more information about licensing this new feature.

MM/DD/YY 2:00 PM While adding tapes to the library, we encountered a problem where the library said it had empty slots which ARCserve could not use for importing. After analyzing the problem, it was discovered that the library thought it had 5 empty slots when in actuality it was full. The library was then instructed to re-inventory itself which corrected the problem. There was NO PROBLEM with ARCserve (although I thought that it may be an ARCserve problem in the beginning) as ARCserve gets it tape barcode/slot information from the library.

CA SWAT was involved after multiple weeks where support could not solve the problem. After a period of time, it was decided that CA would have a SWAT person on site 7 days a week and 24 hours a day. This was done because the tape slot problem was happening somewhat randomly (although mostly at night) and it was felt that one had to immediately get involved looking at the current mix of jobs running and the ARCserve and Operating Systems logs to try and see where the failures were occurring.

One night at about 2:30 AM while I was monitoring the backup jobs, the customer’s night shift tape person came in and proceeded to go into the server room to take out the used tapes and add new tapes into the library. The normal process for this operation would be to go to the tape library console and instruct the tape library to move the old tapes (up to 10 at a time) to the export cap. Then the operator would remove these tapes and load in up to 10 new tapes. Next the operator would instruct the tape library to move these 10 new tapes from the cap to their assigned slots within the tape library LSM. This could take quite awhile if one had 30 or 40 tapes to unload and reload. As I was curious about how this was actually done (and I was also very bored), I decided to go in the server room and watch the tape operator move the tapes. Normally, I would be in the datacenter watching the ARCserve job consoles waiting for something to fail.

Here is what I observed (My support log entry):

MM/DD/YY 2:35 AM -  I was talking to the customer’s night operations person and he stated that he had opened the side panel (not the front door or the cap) of the library and moved 5 tapes early this morning. I asked him why he did this and he stated that everyone (tape library service technician, and customer IT people, etc) sometimes do this to save a little time when they are in a rush. IF YOU DO THIS, BOTH THE TAPE LIBRARY AND ARCserve WILL NOT KNOW ABOUT THESE CHANGES. ALSO, AS THE ROBOTIC ARM WAS OPERATIONAL AT THE TIME, SEVERE INJURY COULD OCCUR WHILE A PERSON MOVED TAPES WHILE THE ROBOTIC ARM COULD ALSO BE IN MOTION.) This is the probable cause of the library problem we encountered at MM/DD/YY 2:00 PM. I have instructed EVERYONE that they are NEVER to move tapes or change anything on the tape library via taking off the side panels to the LSM. All changes must be done through the CAP or the front doors so that the tape library and ARCserve know of these changes. This could turn out to be the cause of many ARCserve problems in the past as the current tape operator and the previous operators would do this function every so often.

As it turned out, the tape slot problem was not the fault of ARCserve and was purely the fault of poorly monitored tape operator procedures on how to change tapes in the tape library. After putting into place new tape replacement procedures, the tape slot problem totally disappeared at this site. The reason that this was not caught earlier is that it was rare for any of the CA personnel to go into the server room and any tape slot failures would occur hours later after the next set of backup jobs started running and new tapes were needed for those backups.

Microsoft Exchange versions 2007 and 2010 do not include these technologies by default. The Exchange Administrator will need to download the MAPI-CDO package from www.Microsoft.com and install it on the Exchange servers that you will be protecting.

If the MAPI-CDO package is installed before the CA ARCserve Backup Agent for Exchange is installed, ARCserve will detect the presence of the required binaries and automatically prepare the Exchange server for granular backups and restores during the Agent Installation.

If the MAPI-CDO package is installed after the CA ARCserve Backup Agent for Exchange is installed, please perform the following steps to enable granular backups and restores:

1. Make sure that no one is using the CA ARCserve Management Console to perform any operations (i.e. browse, backup, restore, etc.) on the Exchange Server.
2. Login to the Microsoft Exchange Server
3. Stop the CA ARCserve Universal Agent Service.
4. Open a command-line window, and go to the CA ARCserve Exchange Agent’s home directory
5. Under the “DocumentLevel” subdirectory, execute the following command

   ExchDocWrapper.exe –regServer

   1. This command verifies the existence of the MAPI-CDO package and registers the Document-Level functionality.
6. Start the CA ARCserve Universal Agent service

You will now be able to perform document-level backups of your Microsoft Exchange servers.

ARCserve has now implemented news feeds directly in your console so that you can easily keep up-to-date with what is happening .  These news feeds are constantly updated with the latest information on:

• Technology:  Hear about new features that are in the ARCserve and how to use them.
• Product Updates:  Quickly see announcement of any product updates that are available and how to get them.
• Tips & Tricks:  Hear from development and product management about new capabilities (and some tricks) which can help you use ARCserve more effectively.
• Real life experiences:  Hear from CA’s field engineers as they come across new uses or best use cases from our customers.

You can also subscribe to the ARCserve News feeds using your favorite RSS reader.  So whether you are using a smart-phone RSS reader application, Microsoft Outlook, My Yahoo, iGoogle or any other internet news reader, simply click on the orange RSS icon located on the ARCserve interface for the registration link then copy and paste it in to your favorite RSS reader application.

Some of the new items in this release are:

• Infrastructure Visualization.  Now you can graphically see backup reports and utilization of your system, network and storage components.
• Centralized Management.  We have extended the centralized management capabilities so that you can now see multiple ARCserve domains and locations in a single view.
• Microsoft Application 2010 Support.  ARCserve Backup r15 supports the latest releases of Microsoft Exchange & SharePoint including Microsoft’s new Exchange DAG feature.
• Granular Restore of Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint.  With ARCserve r15, you now have the ability to backup and restore objects such as individual emails in Microsoft Exchange and individual documents in Microsoft SharePoint.
• Virtualization.  ARCserve r15 maintains our commitment to supporting the latest in virtualization.  Feel safe in knowing that as you upgrade or implement the latest in Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware and now Citrix, that you can backup and restore those environments.