CA's BrightStor Enterprise Backup To Get ARCserve Integration

Slated to be unveiled late this month, Enterprise Backup 10.5 is designed help CA move toward an on-demand storage model, said Turner, who gave CRN a sneak peek at some of the product's features after his keynote presentation on Tuesday at the Storage World Conference here.

With the ability to manage ARCserve, Enterprise Backup 10.5 marks the first time that CA's enterprise-class and entry-level products are integrated, Turner said. As a result, ARCserve job definitions will seamlessly transfer to Enterprise Backup so that data managed by ARCserve can also be managed by the latter.

Turner said he doesn't expect customers to use Enterprise Backup for all of their storage management needs. Instead, data must be classified according to its value and required level of protection to determine the best way to secure it, he said.

"For example, [Enterprise Backup] controls storage snapshots and moves the copies to tape in the background," Turner said. "However, the hardware to do that is expensive. So you want to do it only on high-value data."

To integrate snapshot capability for SQL databases into Enterprise Backup 10.5, CA and Microsoft had teams of developers work together to devise best practices for backing up and restoring SQL databases, a difficult task when the application is running, Turner said.

Using a CA-supplied, 2.5-Tbyte database--along with Unisys servers and Hitachi Data Systems arrays--CA and Microsoft demonstrated live snapshots of the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database, with archiving running at about 2.6 Tbytes per hour and restores at about 2.2 Tbytes per hour, he said. And with such snapshots, it's possible to eliminate the backup window by archiving a disk-based snapshot of the database to tape, he added. "What we demonstrated was mission-critical data protection for the Windows environment," Turner said.

In the near future, CA plans to enhance its SAN Manager application with technology from its acquisition of Netreon earlier this year, he said. The company already has demonstrated integration between SAN Manager and Netreon's SAN Designer application, which allows SANs to be designed on-screen with all connections and labels represented on the screen, he said.

With that enhancement, a solution provider could design a SAN using SAN Designer, Turner said. Once designed, SAN Manager could be set to do a full discovery of all the devices and connections of the newly installed SAN and feed the results back to SAN Designer, which then would automatically show where any problem spots reside, he said.