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May 5, 2010 – CA, Inc. announced significant updates to its family of backup and recovery products, including a new snapshot product with block-level incremental data capture and a rebranding of its XOsoft line.

ARCserve D2D, CA’s new image-based disk-to-disk backup solution, gives the company a leg up on its most direct competitor, Symantec, say analysts.

“ARCserve and Symantec Backup Exec go head-to-head in this area, and it’s always a feature-battle war,” says Dave Russell, research vice president of storage technologies and strategies for Gartner. “This D2D product is a differentiator that Symantec doesn’t have an answer for right now. Additionally, wrapping XOsoft around this ARCserve umbrella also provides a differentiator.”

ARCserve D2D provides rapid recovery for Windows disk-based servers, Windows platforms and Microsoft applications, according to the company release. CA’s new backup technology includes block-level infinite incremental backup, protection for virtual servers, bare metal recovery to dissimilar hardware, high-frequency backups, Web 2.0 interface and end-user search and restore.

“This product is meant to be more on the small system, single server or personal computer level,” says Russell. “It’s meant to be something that’s easy to use – no configuration or fancy parameters. Backing up is as simple as pressing a button that says ‘backup.’”

Lauren Whitehouse, Senior Analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. describes CA’s appeal to the SMB market and new style of backup and recovery as a bit of a twist for the market, appealing to the industry’s increasing comfort with disk-based storage. “Now that people are getting comfortable with disk, you have more capabilities, including snapshots, which capture the whole stack and are able to recover information so much more quickly.”

Companies are increasingly using disk backup and holding the data for longer period of time, says Whitehouse citing an April Enterprise Strategy Group research report (“Data Protection Market Trends, April 2010”). “In 2008, 66 percent of businesses kept data on disk for a week before transferring it to tape. Today, the majority keep it for a month to six months,” she said. “Eighty percent have disk assisted backup somewhere in the data process.”

Additional enhancements to CA’s ARCserve family of products include major releases of CA ARCserve Backup, CA ARCserve Replication and CA ARCserve High Availability.

Adrienne Baker is associate editor at Information Management. She can be reached at adrienne.baker@sourcemedia.com.