Arcserve, the data-protection vendor, has unveiled the latest version of its established Replication and High Availability (RHA) application, which now gives business users the capabilities to protect their Linux and Azure workloads using the software.

Arcserve RHA’s latest version adds full-system high availability for Linux, extends its full-system support of Windows and Linux workloads to Azure, and provides a range of performance and usability improvements and new platform certifications, the company said.

Oussama El-Hilali, Arcserve’s CTO, told Channel Futures that a key differentiator in a crowded market for his company’s application is that Arcserve RHA provides data protection capabilities for both physical as well as virtual servers.

Arcserve’s Oussama El-Hilali

“Most competitors give preferential treatment to the virtual part and ignore the physical part or are just coming up to speed on the physical part,” said Al-Hilali. “And the high-availability feature is a requirement in a lot of verticals, including manufacturing and health care.”

Arcserve’s product also allows replication of data as well as of applications, while competing products don’t always do both, he said.

Several major new features in the new version of Arcserve RHA are its all-new support for Linux, it’s new ability to switch hypervisors for replication to VMware, Hyper-V or KVM, and new support for Microsoft Azure.

Steven Hill, a storage technology analyst with 451 Research, said reducing the complexity of hybrid IT is a goal for vendors today as they work to serve the channel and their customers.

“Arcserve’s approach to reduce this complexity and mitigate it through a common platform is a good approach,” he said. “Ultimately it comes down to having a holistic approach to this.”

Ten years ago, data protection was all about data backup, he said, but today the important thing is getting data and applications back into operation as quickly as possible if there is a disruption.

451 Research’s Steven Hill

“We’re in a different world now,” said Hill. “Recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) of a couple of days was common a few years ago, but that’s not acceptable anymore.”

Nowadays the focus is on application and data availability across all platforms from virtual to physical, the cloud and anywhere else, he said.

“In the case of what Arcserve is doing here, this lets them do replication data recovery in multiple ways, from cloud to cloud, cloud to physical or whatever.”

This strategy is the new trend across the industry, said Hill.

The application awareness component in Arcserve RHA is also important for users because it provides the ability for application-level consistency to put applications on any servers so they can be spun up right away, he said. These features will be good for channel partners because it gives them broad and flexible capabilities for data protect in hybrid environments, he added.

Companies today have critical data and application uptime requirements, but often they don’t know how to provide the needed protections on their own, said Hill.

“Typically, it’s not about data loss nowadays — it’s about data availability, being able to get it back quickly so that your applications remain available” to customers and employees, he noted.

“Right now disaster recovery, business continuity and data protection are really evolving quickly based on this RTO and RPO model,” said Hill. “You need the ability to go from practically any hardware or cloud to practically any other hardware or cloud. Business continuity is really the goal. Disaster recovery —well, not everything that happens in IT is a disaster. What you need is to be able to put IT systems in better control of taking care of this rapidly when it happens.”