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…

Now you can protect Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 workstation environments as part of your imagebased backup and disaster recovery goals.

• Take full advantage of enhanced data integrity, availability, and scalability offered by Windows Resilient File System (ReFS) and achieve comprehensive data protection.

 

• Virtualize with Hyper-V v3.0 and feel confident that your data is protected. Protect the cost-savings benefits you achieved by virtualizing in the first place with a single solution for both physical and virtual servers. And you can run at the hypervisor level for single-pass backup of all Hyper-V VMs. 

 

• Protect NTFS Deduplicated primary volumes using either optimized or non-optimized backup methods and still achieve granular file-level recovery.

 

• Take advantage of more flexible and resilient storage virtualization capabilities with Windows Storage Space knowing your data is protected.

 

• Application-consistent backup and restore of Exchange 2013 databases.

 

• Gain more flexibility when restoring data with uEFI-BIOS interchange. Go from uEFI to BIOS and vice-versa. This is especially useful when performing Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) as you don’t need to have the same type of hardware which may mean faster and less expensive recovery.

 

• Shorten backup time with catalog-less backup. For faster search and recovery, users can run ad-hoc catalog creation jobs at any time.

 

• CA ARCserve® Central Protection Manager and CA ARCserve® Central Reporting can be used to deploy, manage and report on CA ARCserve D2D in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 environments.

 

• CA ARCserve® Central Host Based VM Backup (VMware VMs Only) includes all the same Windows Server 2012 support listed above for CA ARCserve D2D. 

 

• CA ARCserve® Central Virtual Standby now supports “remote standby” across a Wide Area Network through integration with CA ARCserve® Replication. Customers and Partners like MSPs can now replicate CA ARCserve D2D recovery points to a remote site and then automatically convert the recovery points to VM format and quickly stand them up after a production server failure for fast system recovery. This application also now supports failover of Hyper-V v3.0 VMs. *Note: Remote Virtual Standby does not offer the heartbeat monitoring and automated failover options that are available when deploying Central Virtual Standby locally.

 

Note: All CA ARCserve D2D customers and partners with current maintenance can download this Update release at no charge and All CA ARCserve Central Applications customers and partners with current maintenance can download these Update Releases at no charge via the “Check for Updates” feature available from the Help menu from within any CA ARCserve Central Application product. For more information please visit the CA Support site: arcserve.com/support

Copyright © 2013 CA. Linux® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries. All rights reserved. Microsoft Windows, Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint, Windows Azure and Windows Explorer are registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, a n d / o r other countries. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks and logosreferenced herein belong to their respective companies.

Solution: Apply published fix RO52116 to all CA ARCserve Central Protection Manager systems used to deploy CA ARCserve D2D r16.

https://support.ca.com/cadocs/0/CA%20ARCserve%20D2D%20r16-ENU/Bookshelf.html

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

By default the BMR is available in 2 ways:

BMR type 1) either with the ARCserve D2D CD itself – the trial download includes the .iso file – this CD boots and presents the BMR dialog directly, or

BMR type 2) booting a standard Windows Installation CD/DVD together with the ARCserve D2D “boot kit” – that’s a USB memory stick with the CA MBR wizard. This boot kit is created from an installed D2D -> tray icon -> Advanced -> Create Boot Kit.

You see both types need a CD or DVD drive to boot.

So what can be done on machines that don’t have a CD drive, or in situations where booting from a CD is not desired?

In this HOWTO we learn how to prepare a USB bootable device, so that no CD boot is required for ARCserve D2D’s BMR process. So we add a 3rd type of BMR booting to D2D’s toolbox:

BMR type 3) booting directly from USB, no CD/DVD required at all.

Please follow along …

1. Take some backups
   

   Well, installing ARCserve D2D, setting up a backup destination and then running some backups should be straight forward. These backups could be used for BMR with the bootable CD, but that’s not what we want today …

   

2. Use USB Memory Stick or a USB Hard Disk
   

   For the bootable data you’ll need at least the space to put the files from the ARCserve D2D BMR CD ~353 MB. I have only tested this on NTFS formatted disks / USB sticks.

   Note: this could be the same USB hard disk that you plan to use as a backup destination – in that case it stores both the D2D data of your machine, as well as the boot files for BMR.

   

3. Copy the BMR CD data to it
   

   I recommend using the VirtualCloneDrive (Elby, free as in beer) to see the content of the .iso file. Copy all files from there to the root of your USB device (disk or flash memory). A simple copy and paste is all you need. Winzip can also extract files from the .iso to the USB volume.

   

4. Make the Partition Active
   

   This is done with diskpart:

   a) Start -> Run – “diskpart”

   b) list disk (now check the size – which number is the USB disk? we’ll need this right now …)

   c) select disk n (where n is the number like 1 or 2 from b) above)

   d) list partition (usually there is only 1 parition there – if it has a little star as the first character of the line, you’re already done with this step)

   e) select parition 1

   f) active

   g) list parition (now you see the *)

   h) exit

    

   

    

5. Test 1 – Booting it up
   

   Now find a way to boot the USB drive anywhere you want. Depending on the BIOS, you might have to hit F12 for a list of boot devices, or F1 to enter the BIOS setup and enable USB booting. You should see the Boot Manager with 2 BMR options – x86 and x64

   

6. Test 2 – Access to your backup data
   

   The BMR boot should be pretty quick, and next thing to check is access to your data. If the D2D backup data is on the same disk, it will be found automatically. If not, think how this BMR system can access the data. If this is available on some NAS or another server’s share, simply enter the UNC path as: \\server\share\

   

7. Test 3 – Review the recovery points (backup versions)
   

   Once you see the machine name in the top part, and the recovery points list below, that’s a pretty good sign that your BMR and data access is all good. If you have a spare disk, you could try out the actual BMR restore process, and take note of how quick or slow it goes.

   

Conclusion

That’s it. . Nothing better than knowing that a full server restore is just 2 or 3 clicks away, and you tested it. Feels good? You’ll sleep better now. Let me know if you like this, or if you run into problems … here in the comments.

By: KaiS

Followers of this blog may note that recently I used ARCserve D2D Bare Metal Recovery to migrate a Windows Server 2008 R2 host to new hardware. Really it was just a simple upgrade to new larger hard drives. D2D performed the task flawlessly.

As it turns out, one of the two Seagate 1 TB drives started to act up about a month after the upgrade. Windows Server 2008 R2 frequently reported a problem with the drive, and rebooting the server was not much different than a trip to Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun’s roulette tables. It was hit or miss whether the system would actually boot. Often a POST error would proclaim no disk drive was found. Quite disheartening.

After upgrading the Dell server BIOS, and continuing to have SMART hardware failures I then tried to further diagnose the problem by installing Seagate’s “Seatools” to run diagnostic tests. As expected, all tests failed. Strange. The system would occasionally boot, however once booted the incessant notices of drive failures would continue to be reported every few minutes by Windows.

I knew I needed to save the various configuration and settings customizations which I made between the drive upgrade and the time the drive decided to flake out and get all wiggy. I was not sure I could trust that the system was stable enough to be able to complete a full backup or cloning operation.

Suddenly… light dawned on Marblehead… I remembered before the disk upgrade I had completed a full backup using CA ARCserve D2D. Since I already had a good known “full” recovery point, I could simply run a block level incremental backup which could be completed very quickly. I kicked off the ARCserve D2D incremental backup job, and stored the recovery point to the same location the prior full backup job used.

The incremental backup job completed very quickly; before Windows reported another problem with the hard drive. My anxiety of losing my customizations has been relieved. Now I had a solid up-to-date backup of the system. I can now replace the bad hard drive with a new one, then kick of another ARCserve D2D BMR to fully recover the system without losing my customizations. ARCserve D2D Rescued me!

–
chrisc

My challenge was that a Dell 745 tower with Windows Server 2008 R2 was running out of disk space on both its boot partition and its data partition.
My goal was to replace the original two 160 GB hard disks with two new 1 TB disks.

I performed a full backup using ARCserve D2D backing up both C:\ and D:\ volumes. Once the backup was complete, I shut down the server and replaced the old disks with the new 1 TB disks.

After the disks were replaced the next step is to boot from the ARCserve D2D Bare Metal Recovery CD. (This CD was created from the ARCserve D2D BMR ISO which was burned to a CD).

During the ARCserve D2D Bare Metal Recovery process you have the option to resize the target partitions. Since the original partitions were only 160GB and the desired result was to increase the available disk space for these partitions, I chose the option to resize and set the partitions sizing to consume all of the space available. Then submitted these changes to ARCserve D2D BMR, and let the recovery process continue.

A short time later the recovery was complete. Both C:\ and D:\ volumes were recovered and the system then rebooted. After the reboot was completed a quick view at the Windows Server 2008 disk manager shows the two larger size partitions with plenty of free space available.

Goal accomplished!

CA ARCserve D2D provided a fast and easy way to upgrade to new hardware with a simple easy to use interface.

–
chrisc

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.

Here is how to do it.

Part 1 of 2: Create a VHD formatted copy of your ARCserve D2D backup.

1. Launch ARCserve D2D and in the Tasks menu, select ‘Export Recovery Point’.
2. The Export Recovery Point GUI will launch.  It looks a lot like the Restore GUI.
3. Select any available backup date and any available time range.  It does not matter if it is the last full backup or any incremental backup.
4. Identify a destination location to create the VHD formatted backup image.
5. IMPORTANT:  Change the compression setting to ‘No Compression’.
6. Select the ‘Create a Copy’ button at the bottom.

ARCserve D2D will then immediately create a synthesized point in time copy of your backup repository by combining your last full backup and all appropriate incremental backups up to and including the date and time you selected.  It will also decompress your backups if you had compressed them.  This new copy is now in Microsoft VHD format.  You can now copy this file to any offsite location for extra protection or move it to another MS Windows computer and easily access the data.

Part 2 of 2: Mounting the backup as a drive letter.

1. Make sure that the new backup file is copied locally to the machine you want to mount it on.
2. Open ‘Disk Manager’ by right clicking on ‘Computer’ in your Start menu and select ‘Manage’.
3. Under ‘Computer Management’, select ‘Storage’ > ‘Disk Management’
4. From the top menu, select ‘Action’ > ‘Attach VHD’
5. A popup window will appear.  Simply browse to your exported file.
6. IMPORTANT: Be sure to check the box labeled ‘READ ONLY’.  If you do not, the process of mounting the VHD file will change it and ARCserve D2D will no longer be able to use the file.

NOTE:  This VHD formatted file is not bootable at this time.

Have fun and tell us what you think.  We especially would like to hear about interesting ways you can use this feature.

Thank you,

Eric and Prashant

For more information on using the ‘Export Recovery Point’ feature, please go to: http://www.arcservedocs.com/arcserved2d/r15/help/us/cad2d_manage_recovery_points.htm

In the mean time, we have been diligently working on adding support for laptop computers and for Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system.  We need your help in testing these new platforms.

There are four environments that we need testing:

1. Windows XP on Desktops
2. Windows XP on Laptops
3. Windows Vista on Laptops
4. Windows 7 on Laptops

Best of all, you will get paid for your help!

If you are interested, simply do the following:

1. Open an Amazon Mechanical Turk account if you already do not have one at:  http://www.mturk.com.
2. Once in, use the search at the top of the screen for HITs containing the word ‘d2d’.  The results will return a current list of all of the testing we are looking to be performed.

We look forward to hearing your feedback.

Thank you;

CA ARCserve D2D Development Team

What’s New for CA ARCserve D2D Beta Refresh 2

2.0 New Features and Fixes for Beta Refresh 2

1.0 Welcome

Welcome to What’s New for CA ARCserve D2D Beta Refresh
Build 2. This file contains information about the following:

• New features and fixes that have been added to improve CA
  ARCserve D2D
• Removing the previous CA ARCserve D2D beta build and
  installing the updated CA ARCserve D2D beta refresh build.
  You should read this file before beginning the installation.

2.0 New Features and Fixes for Beta Refresh 2

CA ARCserve D2D has been updated for Beta Refresh 2 to add
the following new features, capabilities, and fixes:

• Added capability to select/unselect specific volumes from
  backup
• Provides a separate WinPE ISO available for Disaster
  Recovery. You no longer need to download WAIK to create a
  boot kit.
  • Same ISO works for both 32-bit and 64-bit
  • Same ISO can be used with all the supported languages
• Changed the name of “Resync Backup” to “Verify Backup” for
  better understanding of this source verification process.
• Provides the capability to subscribe to All RSS feeds to
  keep you posted on the latest news and information related
  to CA ARCserve D2D.

  A separate dialog lists all the RSS feeds that you can
  subscribe to and includes feeds for the following:

  • Unsuccessful Jobs
  • Videos
  • Provide Your Feedback to CA ARCserve D2D Development
    (GetSatisfaction forum)
  • User-Community Discussions (CA ARCserve D2D Google Group)
  • Expert Advice Center (CA ARCserve D2D Blogs)
• Added Video selection capability to allow you to select the
  location of video (either from YouTube or from CA Support)
• Added a utility to allow you to change CA ARCserve D2D
  server communication protocol to use HTTPS or HTTP.
• Added a new calculation tool to allow you to estimate
  future disk space requirements on the destination.
• Added System Tray Monitor enhancements for the following:
  • Turn ON/OFF social networking panel in the main UI
  • Turn ON/OFF RSS feeds in the main UI
  • Control pop-up messages displayed by tray monitor (All,
    Errors and Warnings, or None)
• URL to connect from a remote machine is displayed in Setup
  and Getting Started Dialog
• The following fixes have been added to CA ARCserve D2D in
  response to suggestions/issues that were received from
  users through the GetSatisfaction.com forum:

Go to the beta website to install the latest version.

• Volume Selection
• Built-in boot kit
• Backup Space Estimator
• Social Networking Control
• Improved eMail Alerts

Here are some important links for Beta testers:

1. Release Notes
2. Test Plan
3. Beta support page

Hi, my name is Eric Pitcher, I am in the development organization which makes ARCserve D2D.  I thought I would do some blog entries to tell you of my experiences in using ARCserve D2D at home.  Over the next few updates, I will be writing about the benefits and environmental challenges of using D2D in a home networking environment.  I am really putting D2D to the test and so far it is going well.

My environment is typical of most home environments. I have I have a 4 port wireless B/G router which is connected via 10/100 Ethernet connections to the web through my cable TV service.  I also have a home network attached storage (NAS) device.  This is a little unusual to have such a device at home, but with the growth rate of digital pictures, video and music, having a central place with a large amount of disk space that all of my family’s systems can get to is a real benefit.  I have three laptops connected wirelessly to the network each running a different version of Microsoft Windows (XP, Vista and Windows 7).  Each laptop I have the S: drive mapped to a common network share on the NAS device so that everyone can share files.  Nothing in this environment is special, high-end, expensive or complicated. All of this equipment is two years or older and is standard off-the-shelf stuff from a national home electronics store.  (Windows 7 is of course new but the laptop it is running is not.)  Please note that if you do not have a home NAS device, a system with a shared drive will do the same thing as long as it uses or emulates a standard Microsoft file system (CIFS).

Home Environment

In this first blog entry, I am going to tell you about setting up a basic home network backup.

I downloaded and installed ARCserve D2D on my Windows 7 laptop.  During installation I made sure to write down the port number that I configured D2D to use.  Be sure to keep this port number information for future use!

Configuration was easy.  In the backup settings, I set the backup destination to be the UNC path to a share on the NAS device, upon pressing the arrow next to the dialogue box I was prompted for the username and password for access to the network share on the NAS device.  I then was able to browse the network share to select the destination directory.  I then setup the schedule to run every day at noon with ‘Incremental Backup’ set to repeat every day and ‘Full Backup’ set to never.  In ‘Settings’, I backup to keep 7 instances (one weeks worth) and kept compression at ‘Standard’.  Done!
Here are some things to keep in mind:

- At the time of the writing of this blog, I am using the initial beta version of ARCserve D2D (Build 154)

- Using network shares: Drive letters mounted as network shares do not show up in the browse dialog box in the initial beta.  You must use a UNC path, i.e. \\computername\sharename.  TIP: Only put in the computername and sharename in the dialogue box, then use the share button to identify the directory you want to use.

- Share username and password: All normal networking authentication works with ARCserve D2D.  Just keep in mind that most home environments are not in a domain or workgroup so you will need to have an account on each share.  ARCserve D2D will automatically remember this information for you so you do not have to type in the account information each time you reboot.

Have fun!

In my future entries I will be writing about multiple computer backup and management in my home environment.

- Eric