Arcserve, the disaster recovery and data backup vendor, is bolstering its flagship Unified Data Protection application with new capabilities that now automatically protect data for Microsoft Office 365 users and backs up data for production workloads running on Nutanix AHV virtualized systems.  

The new capabilities are part of the updated Arcserve UDP 7.0, which provides disaster recovery and backup services for hybrid cloud, hyperconverged and SaaS-based infrastructures.  

The new Microsoft Office 365 backup and recovery services are included to provide additional capabilities for Office 365 business users whose contracts with Microsoft don’t include data backup services, Oussama El-Hilali, Arcserve’s CTO, told Channel Futures. Using UDP, those users will now be able to perform cloud-to-cloud backups to keep user and customer data secure in the event of a disaster, deleted files or other issues, he said. The Office 365 support includes backup capabilities for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.

Arcserve’s Oussama El-Hilali

“It can be backed up to another cloud or on-prem, which is something that some of our customers strongly indicated that they wanted,” said El-Hilali.

The new Nutanix AHV backup and recovery services are also important because they offer customers a choice of additional virtual machine hypervisors beyond the traditional Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware hypervisor choices, he said.

“The Nutanix AHV hypervisor is getting as much credibility as Hyper-V and VMware, and that means people will be migrating in the future,” he said.

Arcserve customers have diverse IT environments, so offering them an agentless backup for Linux or Windows virtual machines makes sense, added El-Hilali.

Ken Fletcher, CEO for Arcserve MSP partner Quarterhorse Technology, told Channel Futures that the latest version of UDP provides granular control for MSPs and their customers to configure backup for Office 365 from a single control panel.

Quarterhorse Technology’s Ken Fletcher

“As the number of the hyperconverged environments continues to grow, Arcserve’s support of Nutanix gives clients the confidence that their backup solution is in lockstep with this technology instead of trying figure out the best methodology of backing up their environment based on a limited number of options,” said Fletcher. “OneDrive support now rounds out Arcserve’s ability to protect the Microsoft Office 365 ecosystem,” including email and document folders.

The extended capabilities in support of Microsoft Office 365, especially for OneDrive for Business, have been a continuing request from customers and partners, according to Arcserve.  

Arcserve UDP provides backup and disaster recovery features to protect a wide range of workloads, while cutting recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) to minutes and seconds, the company said.

Adam Smith, information systems manager for U.K.-based Dominion Fiduciary Services, said UDP 7.0 has been in production with his company’s Nutanix deployment for more than two months and has been performing well, creating host-based backups of Nutanix clusters. Dominion has been undergoing a hardware and software refresh since January that included Nutanix, when it bought several Arcserve UDP appliances for the system. Dominion looked at backup devices from one other vendor in its research for the right hardware and software and eventually chose Arcserve.

“I felt that Arcserve was in a much better position to work with Nutanix AHV hypervisor,” said Smith. Arcserve UDP 7.0 has allowed Dominion to transform what had been a manual 45-minute daily backup process into a process that now reviews the backup status of its Nutanix servers in about 1 minute, he said. His department supports about 100 users.

“It’s made a massive difference to us to have this new platform as well as Arcserve UDP,” he said. “It frees us up and allows us to hopefully be more proactive with other services to the company.”

IDC analyst Phil Goodwin said that backup of SaaS applications is a greenfield opportunity for data protection vendors today because …

… many don’t backup their data outside of any backups provided by their SaaS vendors.

IDC’s Phil Goodwin

“For example, of the roughly 300 million Office 365 seats, we estimate that fewer than 10% of them are backed up separately from Microsoft’s default policies,” said Goodwin. “IT organizations are learning that the default backup, data retention and SLA policies of SaaS vendors rarely meet corporate requirements; therefore, many IT organizations are starting to look for separate backup capabilities — usually to retain that data on premises, though sometimes in the cloud.”

The new capabilities for Nutanix backups are also interesting news for customers, said Goodwin.

“Nutanix is certainly a leading hyperconverged vendor, and I would imagine this announcement will be important for Nutanix channel partners who are interested in bundling an Arcserve backup solution.” 

With the recent trend of backup and disaster recovery services converging rather than remaining as separate operations, the latest release makes sense for users, said Goodwin.

“The Arcserve solution helps to substantially simply disaster recovery by making it an extension of backup,” he said.

Arcserve UDP 7.0 can run on Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, 2012 R2,  2012, 2008 R2, 2008, and Windows versions 10, 8.1, 8 or 7, as well as on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0-7.6, CentOS 6.0-7.6, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.3-12.4, Oracle Linux Server 5.5-7.4, Oracle UEK R5, Debian 8.0-9.8 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS-18.04 LTS.