Our quest to find the best backup/restore, disaster recovery, replication and business continuity product looks at the latest versions of CA ARCserve (r16.5) and Acronis Backup and Recovery (v11.5).
Executive Summary
CA ARCserve r16.5’s image-based backup component is faster than Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5, it uses superior technologies (such as Infinite Incrementals), it works with more cloud vendors, it offers Virtual Standby for automated cold failover and CA ARCserve’s reports are far more useful and informative. Moreover, CA ARCserve r16.5 costs much less than Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5.
While Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5 offers image-based backups for both
Windows and Linux, its add-ons for data deduplication and Bare Metal Restore (BMR) are extra-cost options.
CA ARCserve has many features that Acronis Backup and Recovery completely lacks. These include file-based backup, comprehensive replication and automated high availability for the Windows, Linux and UNIX environments.
CA ARCserve r16.5 is the clear choice for those organizations needing quality backup/restore as well as maximum high availability and replication.
CA ARCserve r16.5 has again earned the Network Testing Labs World Class Award for best data protection and business continuity.
CA ARCserve r16.5 and Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5 both offer to protect and preserve your data using a variety of backup/restore approaches. Both have many features to tempt organizations needing to protect critical data from failures, disasters and human mistakes. CA ARCserve r16.5 provides image-based backups for Windows environments while Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5 offers support for both Windows and Linux.
How do CA ARCserve r16.5 and Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5 measure up? Which is best suited to your particular computing environment?
We decided to look closely and in detail at the abilities and shortcomings of both CA ARCserve r16.5 and Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5. In this report, we compare and contrast the two products, feature by feature.
In contrast to CA ARCserve, Acronis Backup and Recovery can produce only image-based backups. Acronis Backup and Recovery does not do file-image-based backup and recovery, has no replication capability and does not offer high availability. Accordingly, we’ve had to assign Acronis Backup and Recovery zero scores in the file-based, replication and high availability-based sections of this report.
CA ARCserve’s components are CA ARCserve Backup (file-based), CA ARCserve D2D (image-based), CA ARCserve Replication (for disaster recovery) and CA ARCserve High Availability (for rapid system failover and business continuity).
Acronis Backup and Recovery’s separately-priced components are Acronis Backup & Recovery Server for Windows, Acronis Backup & Recovery Server for Linux, Acronis Backup & Recovery Workstation, Acronis Backup & Recovery Server for Windows with Microsoft SQL Server, Acronis Backup & Recovery for Microsoft Exchange Server, Acronis Backup & Recovery Online, Acronis vmProtect 8, Acronis vmProtect 8 Online, Universal Restore and Deduplication.
CA ARCserve r16.5’s improvements include:
Windows Server 2012 Support, All Product Areas NTFS deduplication support
Resilient File System (ReFS) support
Hyper-V 3.0 support
Distributed VSS support
Storage Spaces support
CA ARCserve’s image- and file-based backup also support Windows 8.
Image-based Backup Enhancements Remote Virtual Standby
vSphere 5.1
Catalog-less backups for reducing overhead and shortening the backup window
BMR of systems with BIOS to uEFI & vice-versa
Support for Eucalyptus 3.x
Support for additional Microsoft Azure regions
Host-based VM Backup Enhancements
o Support for Exchange 2013 o Catalog-less backups
o Host-based VM backup recovery point replication o BMR or file recovery from replication recovery points o Replication recovery points can be Virtual Standby basis o Support for Eucalyptus 3.x
o Support for additional Microsoft Azure regions
File-Based Backup Enhancements
Improved NTFS volume backup performance (more than 40% faster)
Improved Hyper-V VHD volume backup performance (nearly 4 times faster)
Support for LTO 6 tape and Logical Block Protection
Support for VHDX virtual volumes (Up to 64TB on Hyper-V 3.0)
Support for Fujitsu Cloud & Eucalyptus 3.x
Support for backup of SQL 2012 AAG clusters
Support for a variety NAS port configurations
Improved D2D light integration
Improved deduplication management
Improved management of pending, failed & held migration jobs
Usability fine tuning
Replication and High Availability Enhancements Scenario Creation Wizard improvements
Scenario wizard includes ARCserve HBBU server
Full system “Cascade scenario” for switching over to multiple replicas
Full system scenario failover to Hyper-V 3.0
Hyper-V 3.0 scenario supports WAN failover
Improved SMTP and scenario authentication support for multi-tenant, MSP mail servers
AES-128, AES-256 (or none) encryption options
Export replication reports as HTML-format email attachments
Full system scenario supports uEFI, GPT boot disk & Dynamic Disks
Full system scenario VM settings can be modified while the scenario is running
BMR preserves destination volumes
Support for Eucalyptus 3.x
Support for additional Amazon regions
Protection of multiple Oracle database instances with a single RHA scenario
Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5’s improvements include:
Basic support for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 Bootable media based on WinPE 4
UEFI Secure Boot supported
ReFS file system support
Storage space recovery to alternate destination
Back up and recover data deduplication volumes
Backup and recovery of Microsoft Exchange Server data Support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
Exchange Express full backup method
Exchange clustering support
Choose from multiple Exchange reversion points
Backup Exchange data to more types of storage
Enhanced Exchange granular recovery
Recover Exchange data to file folders or post office-format files
Single-pass backup of Microsoft SQL Server
Recover disks, volumes, files or Microsoft SQL Server databases
Recover Microsoft SQL Server databases or extract them as files
Truncate SQL Server logs after a backup
Backup target can include Acronis Online Backup Storage
Supports Microsoft SQL Server 2012
Virtualization
UEFI support (for VMware ESXi 5 only)
File-level recovery to a Windows agent file system or FTP server
Changed Block Tracking (CBT) support for VMware ESX(i) 4.0 and later
VM template support
Microsoft Hyper-V host Bare Metal Recovery
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization support
Back up and recover VMware vSphere 5.1 or Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0 (however, the Hyper-V agent cannot be installed in Windows 8)
Back up and recover from within Oracle VM Server 3.0 or Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 guests
Storage Types
Acronis Online Backup Storage (this is Acronis’ cloud support, and it only works with Windows machines and virtual machines)
Acronis Online Backup supports Grandfather-Father-Son and Tower of Hanoi schemes
File-level recovery from disk images stored on tape
Centralized management
Data catalog vault selection
Completely disable backup cataloging
Truncate VSS Full backup logs after a disk-level backup
Linux
Support for Linux kernel 3.x, Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10, 12.04, Fedora 15, 16, 17, Debian 6 and CentOS 6.x
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) support
Bootable media for kernel version 3.4.5
Support for Oracle Linux 5.x, 6.x
The categories we used in this evaluation are:
Image-based backup features
File-based backup features
Replication/high availability features.
Overall features
For each feature, we provide a detailed ranking of the products and we explain the rankings when they’re dissimilar.
The next feature chart reveals how well CA ARCserve and Acronis Backup and Recovery fare in producing – and recovering – image-based backups.
Image-based Backup
An image-based full system backup contains everything about a computer at the
moment the backup copy was made – the operating system, the system’s current state and the data file disk blocks. The backed up image can later be restored (termed a Bare Metal Restore operation, or BMR) either to the same computer or to another computer of different brand and type. Additionally, image-based backup products offer granular recovery at the application and file level for faster recovery.
Image-based Backup Features Comparison Table
(Scoring from 0 to 5, with 5 the highest)
Feature Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5 CA ARCserve r16.5
Snapshot/image backup technology 4 5
Operating System support 5 3
Device support 5 5
Data deduplication 4 0
Virtual server & client support 5 4
Physical <–> virtual server support 5 5
Cloud capabilities and support 2 4
RTO/RPO (for disaster recovery) 2 4
Granular recovery 5 4
Off-site replication of images 5 5
Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) 5 5
Virtual standby for cold-failover 1 5
Client/workstation support 5 5
Image archiving, retention and versioning
5 5
Centralized management 5 5
Centralized reporting 1 5
SaaS subscriptions with cloud storage 5 5
RMM integration for MSPs 3 4
Image-based backup
Image-based Backup Notes
CA ARCserve’s image-based data protection component has several advantages over Acronis Backup and Recovery’s manipulation of disk images. CA ARCserve implements a superior synthetic backup technology (termed Infinite Incremental), it works with several vendors’ clouds, it is far faster, it offers virtual standby for quick, cold-failover and CA ARCserve integrates with more MSPs. CA ARCserve’s reports are easier to use and understand. Furthermore, CA ARCserve offers many more reports than does Acronis Backup and Recovery.
Acronis Backup and Recovery has some special advantages, as well. Its finer granularity can recover Exchange journals and calendars, it offers source-side data deduplication and it can perform concurrent multiple VM backups.
Snapshot Technology – CA ARCserve and Acronis Backup and Recovery create backup images of physical and virtual environments, and both back up and recover clients as well as servers. Furthermore, both CA ARCserve and Acronis Backup and Recovery offer synthetic backups, in which a full backup is assembled, or synthesized, from a baseline full backup and subsequent incremental backups.
Significantly, CA ARCserve offers true infinite incremental snapshot/image-based backups. In contrast, Acronis cautions its prospective customers to make periodic full backups and not rely on having more than a week or so of Acronis Backup and Recovery synthetic backups.
CA ARCserve’s image-based backup is built on its patent-pending Infinite Incremental (I2 Technology) that enables users to only perform a full backup once (the first time it’s
used) and then only perform incremental backups from that point forward. This
technology has been designed to intelligently manage the backup of only blocks of data that have changed since the last backup and present a consolidated point-in-time view of the protected volume for multiple recovery types, thus reducing your recovery time.
For an additional license fee, on both Windows and Linux, Acronis Backup and Recovery deduplicates data in its image backups. CA ARCserve’s image-based component does not offer data deduplication.
Both CA ARCserve and Acronis Backup and Recovery can create snapshots as often as every 15 minutes
Operating Systems, BMR – Acronis Backup and Recovery supports Linux as well as Windows, but CA ARCserve supports only Windows. Both CA ARCserve and Acronis Backup and Recovery can restore Windows images onto similar or dissimilar hardware via Bare Metal Recovery (BMR). Acronis Backup and Recovery is also able to use BMR to put Linux systems back in working order.
Cloud Support – CA ARCserve’s image-based component works with Amazon Web
Services (AWS), Fujitsu Cloud and Microsoft Azure public clouds to store critical
information offsite for disaster recovery. CA ARCserve also supports Eucalyptus 3.x (an open source, AWS-compatible private cloud). CA ARCserve writes initial snapshot (backup) to disk. A subsequent step copies the file/folder data to a cloud. Once the first image copy is stored in the cloud, CA ARCserve transmits only incremental changes (via I2) from that point forward. This makes the best use of both low-speed cloud connections and expensive high-speed cloud connections.
Acronis Backup and Recovery’s cloud support is limited, through a separate product, to the Acronis company’s own Internet-accessible host. Acronis characterizes its cloud as more of a staging destination than a disaster recovery option. Furthermore, it only works with Windows machines and virtual machines.
Significantly, the Acronis company’s only cloud support, its own Acronis host, does not support:
Backing up from bootable media
Backing up under Linux
Backing up with Agent for Microsoft Exchange Server
Creating differential (synthetic) backups
Using a custom backup scheme
Simplified naming of backup files
Simultaneous host-based backup of multiple virtual machines
Setting up regular conversion of backups to a virtual machine
Validating a backup
Exporting a backup
Mounting a backup
Replicating (copying) or moving backups from the online storage
Converting an incremental backup to full
Validating an archive
Exporting an archive
Remote Management via Managed Service Providers (MSPs) – Two MSPs, Kaseya and Labtech Software, have embraced both CA ARCserve and Acronis Backup and Recovery. A variety of additional MSPs (such as n-Able) also support CA ARCserve.
Performance and Media Usage – CA ARCserve’s I2
is faster than Acronis Backup and Recovery’s synthetic full backup process. However, because Acronis Backup and Recovery deduplicates data, it uses somewhat less less storage space over time. For a complete system comprising 300 GB, Figure 1 shows the relative backup and restore performance of CA ARCserve I2 and Acronis Backup and Recovery.
Figure 1.
CA ARCserve I2 vs. Acronis Backup and Recovery image-based backup/restore
performance
We noted that Acronis Backup and Recovery needed less storage space (146 GB) than CA ARCserve I2 (169 GB) for its deduplicated image-based backups. When we disabled Acronis Backup and Recovery’s deduplication, its storage requirement increased to 173 GB. Both products use compression to reduce storage requirements, and we concluded that CA ARCserve’s compression technology is more advanced. In this test, we created and retained daily, weekly and monthly backups over a three-month time span, and our data contained few duplicates. Figure 2 depicts the resulting disk usage.
Figure 2.
CA ARCserve I2 vs. Acronis Backup and Recovery image-based disk storage utilization 17.6 24.2 21.0 28.8 0.0 5.0 10.0 15.0 20.0 25.0 30.0 35.0
Average System Backup Time (Minutes)
Average System Restore Time (Minutes)
CA ARCserve Acronis Backup & Recovery
169 146 173 130 135 140 145 150 155 160 165 170 175 180
CA ARCserve Acronis Backup & Recovery (with dedupe)
Acronis Backup & Recovery (no
dedupe)
Virtualization Support -- CA ARCserve and Acronis Backup and Recovery both support VMware ESX and vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Red Hat and Citrix XenServer. Acronis Backup and Recovery additionally works with Oracle VM and Parallels.
Impressively, CA ARCserve restored data to a virtual machine in our tests more quickly than did Acronis Backup and Recovery. Figure 3 graphically illustrates this difference. CA ARCserve finished the restore operation in only 14.2 minutes, while Acronis Backup and Recovery took 19.5 minutes to restore the same data. This test used 980 GB of diverse information stored in a repository of a full backup plus 8,640 incrementals.
Figure 3. CA ARCserve I2 vs. Acronis Backup and Recovery VM restoration time
Virtual Standby – CA ARCserve offers Virtual Standby, a feature wherein up-to-date
copies of backup images (recovery points) are available for immediate use in case of a system outage, thus offering near-instantaneous system recovery. CA ARCserve’s Virtual Standby feature automatically converts recovery points into VMDK and VHD formats and automatically registers with the hypervisor. It offers automated and manual failover. Furthermore, CA ARCserve’s virtual standby works in either physical-to-virtual (P2V) or virtual-to-virtual (V2V) failover modes.
Acronis Backup and Recovery, via the Acronis unified backup format, offers a manual (user interface menu option) migration that can recover images from physical servers or other hypervisors to VMware and vice versa. This manual migration option pales in comparison to CA ARCserve’s automated Virtual Standby feature.
14.2 19.5 0.0 5.0 10.0 15.0 20.0 25.0
CA ARCserve Acronis Backup & Recovery
Average VM Restore Time
(minutes)
RTO/RPO Performance Testing – To measure CA ARCserve’s and Acronis Backup and Recovery’s Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) performance, we simulated the destruction of four Windows Server computers
containing a total of 300 GB in a small data center. One of these computers ran SQL Server 2005, one ran Internet Information Server (IIS), one ran an OLTP business application and the fourth was the backup server.
Both CA ARCserve and Acronis Backup and Recovery created snapshots every thirty minutes and transferred the backup material to a remote location. Four computers at the remote location stood by, waiting to go to work in case of a disaster. We measured the minutes needed to recover data and resume operations.
Using CA ARCserve image-based backup in one test and Acronis Backup and Recovery in another test, an administrator at the remote location restored the transferred data onto the waiting secondary servers. The test concluded when the administrator had restored all servers and had brought the OLTP application back online. The CA ARCserve administrator needed just 49 minutes to restore data to the servers and resume the OLTP application. The Acronis Backup and Recovery
administrator needed significantly more time (58 minutes – nearly an hour) to accomplish the same thing.
Central Management – Working with disk images is easy and painless with CA ARCserve's Web 2.0-based management console, and we could access its Rich Internet Application (RIA) Web browser interface from any client computer. Acronis Backup and Recovery’s user interface is a thick, native Windows client that we had to pre-install onto the computers that we used to manage Acronis Backup and Recovery.
Central Reporting –CA ARCserve’s Central Reporting component produced useful and informative reports regarding backup and recovery operations and schedules. The reports CA includes with CA ARCserve are:
Alerts
Application Data Trends
Backup Size Trends
Volume Trends
CPU Utilization
Memory Utilization
Network Utilization
Node Archive Status
Node Backup Status
Virtualization Protection Status
Acronis Backup and Recovery’s reports are fewer and less useful. They include only:
Registered Machines
Local & Centralized Backup Plans on Registered Machines
Local & Centralized Tasks on Registered Machines
Archives & Backups Stored in the Centrally-Managed Vaults
Statistics on Centrally-Managed Vaults
Task Activities
Accessing CA ARCserve’s reports through its dashboard interface is easy, quick and intuitive. The Acronis Backup and Recovery facility for requesting reports is obtuse and not so quick. With Acronis Backup and Recovery, an administrator chooses a report, which can be customizable or predefined. Most Acronis Backup and Recovery reports are customizable, which means they require filter settings. These include:
Whether to report on machines with agents or virtual machines
What status (Ok, Warning or Error) to show
The time period within which the last connection between the machine and the management server occurred
Last successful backup time period
Next backup period
Operating system
IP address range
Machine availability (online or offline)
Granular Recovery – Acronis Backup and Recovery can restore a wide variety of Microsoft Exchange entities, including calendars and journals. CA ARCserve’s fine granularity is limited to Microsoft Exchange databases – mailboxes, e-mail notes and attachments. However, CA ARCserve supports Exchange 2013, while Acronis Backup and Recovery does not.
In the next chart, we take a detailed look at CA ARCserve r16.5 and Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5 file-based backup and restore capabilities.
Note: Acronis Backup and Recovery does not offer any file-based backup to disk or tape and therefore scored zero for all features in this category.
By using CA ARCserve’s file backup tape capabilities along with its image backup, you can quickly and easily copy backups to tape for archiving purposes. CA ARCserve’s image and file backup technologies are well-integrated for ease of use. Acronis Backup and Recovery offers a secondary copy-to-tape feature, which Acronis misleadingly terms replication.
File-based Backup
A file-based backup contains copies of applications and data files you designate, file by file and directory by directory. The backup process automatically and regularly creates the latest backup copy onto whatever media you specify – tape, disk, USB memory or other device. You can archive older backup copies offsite, for safekeeping. Restoring the data copies it back to the source machine or other computer that typically already has an operating system installed on it. However, most file-based backup products also offer some type of bare metal restore (BMR) for system recovery.
File-based Backup Features Comparison Table
(Scoring from 0 to 5, with 5 the highest)
Feature Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5 CA ARCserve r16.5
Tape device support 0 5
Application support 0 5
Tape integration 0 5
Tape archiving, retention and versioning 0 5
Virtual machine protection 0 5
Application-specific granular recovery 0 5
SRM reporting 0 5
Basic backup reporting 0 5
Infrastructure visualization 0 5
Central management 0 4
Deduplication 0 4
Public and private cloud support 0 4
File archiving 0 5
Integration with image-based backups 0 5
Synthetic full backups 0 5
File-based backup features
File-based Backup Notes
Acronis Backup and Recovery has no file-based backup component. It is purely image-based.
CA ARCserve r16 has a wealth of file-based backup features. Moreover, it’s fast, reliable and frugal in its use of storage space.
CA ARCserve supports myriads of operating systems, applications and backup devices. CA ARCserve has superior reporting, its infrastructure visualization and its central management console is responsive and intuitive.
CA ARCserve Central Reporting provides global views, administration and reporting on all devices, settings and policies (running on-premise and off-premise) protected by CA ARCserve. It gives both detailed reports and a summary Dashboard report view that clearly show the overall status as well as individual details for any and all backup operations.
CA ARCserve’s topology map clearly and intuitively displays a customer's infrastructure. By node, virtual machine or device, CA ARCserve graphically presents a hierarchical picture of data backup sets. CA ARCserve’s SRM reporting is revealing, comprehensive and helpful. A person can monitor the status of any and all backup operations, identify long-running backup operations, locate backed up data, discover whether data is encrypted, know the company’s disaster recovery status and track volume, disk and memory usage on each server.
In the last features table, let’s examine the differences between CA ARCserve and Acronis Backup and Recovery in the areas of replication and high availability.
Replication and High Availability
Replication continuously copies changes made to one (master) computer’s files to a secondary (replica) computer. The replica computer is always an exact copy of the master. High Availability manages the relationship between the master and replica computers in a way that makes the replica computer almost instantly assume the role of master if the master computer suffers a problem. Multiple master and replica computers are possible. The result is a file, application or database server that’s virtually always available.
Note: Acronis Backup and Recovery does not offer any replication or high availability features and therefore scored zero for all features in this category.
Replication and High Availability Features Comparison Table
(Scoring from 0 to 5, with 5 the highest)
Feature Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5 CA ARCserve r16.5
Replication 0 5
True high availability (hot failover) 0 5
Physical and virtual server support 0 5
Operating System and application support
0 5
RTO/RPO (for disaster recovery) 0 5
Cloud Integration 0 4
Continuous Data Protection (CDP) 0 5
Offline synchronization 0 5
Replication and HA recovery testing 0 5
Network optimization 0 5
Replication and backup integration 0 4
Assessment mode utility 0 5
Application aware replication 0 5
Replication and high availability features aggregate ranking
0.0 4.9
Replication and High Availability Notes
CA ARCserve’s replication component may be used in a scheduled fashion to migrate and manage offsite backups. In a real-time, continuous manner, CA ARCserve provides true Continuous Data Protection (CDP). CA ARCserve’s replication target can be (and often is) an offsite set of servers or a cloud.
CA ARCserve’s replication component performs asynchronous replication and supports Windows, Linux and UNIX environments. They may be deployed onsite, offsite and/or
linked to a cloud. Basically, CA ARCserve’s replication feature clones each I/O operation and sends the cloned copy to a secondary destination of your choice.
CA ARCserve can replicate between physical and virtual servers (P2P, P2V and V2P) and between virtual server platforms (V2V).
By using both CA ARCserve’s replication and file-based components, we easily made archive copies of replication backups.
Acronis’ misleading notion of replication consists simply of making secondary copies of its image-based backup files.
For companies needing maximum system uptime and availability, CA ARCserve has a High Availability (HA) component. CA ARCserve’s HA component includes all the functions of the replication component and adds the ability to monitor one or more background services running on a server. If a service fails, CA ARCserve will attempt to restart it. If the restart fails, the system can be set to automatically fail over to the replica (or failover) server. Alternately, the administrator can set the system to not automatically failover, thus allowing the administrator to investigate the problem. The administrator can then choose to use push-button failover.
Acronis Backup and Recovery itself has no high availability capabilities. Acronis Backup and Recovery completely lacks CA ARCserve’s feature-rich, mature ability to replicate, monitor and automatically fail over critical servers.
CA ARCserve’s HA component can monitor a single server, group of servers, entire server farm or specific applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, IIS and Dynamics CRM, thus ensuring maximum availability. When a hardware or application failure occurs, CA ARCserve automatically activates the replica server(s). It gives the replica servers IP addresses and host names during activation to make failover transparent to end users, many of whom will never even know an outage occurred.
CA ARCserve’s HA component is perfect for distributed applications like Microsoft SharePoint and Dynamics CRM, which typically have a multi-tier architecture consisting of separate Web, application and database servers. CA ARCserve replicates, monitors and fails over all the servers, not just the database server. And with group management, all component servers can be failed over even if only one fails. This is especially useful when the replica servers are kept at a distant remote location. CA ARCserve offers sophisticated push-button failover and failback for the highest possible level of automated availability.
CA ARCserve comes with many pre-built replication and high availability scenarios. Furthermore, it provides application-aware replication and failover for Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, and IIS, as well as Oracle and Blackberry. In other words, CA ARCserve already knows what specific directories and files to replicate and when – you just indicate which applications to protect.
CA ARCserve’s high availability support for Windows server clusters can replicate and automatically failover Windows clusters as well as replicate to Windows clusters.
CA ARCserve’s Replication and High Availability components include an easy-to-use assessment mode tool for performing “what if” dry runs to assure you have adequate bandwidth for replication. CA ARCserve also offers an Assured Recovery testing feature you can use to perform scheduled or ad-hoc recovery testing at the application level on the replica server, without affecting the production server and end user access or impacting the continuous data protection and monitoring.
When we measured RTO/RPO by performing the same disaster recovery test with CA ARCserve’s High Availability component that we’d done with CA ARCserve’s image-based feature (*see RTO/RPO section above under Image-image-based Backup), CA
ARCserve needed just six seconds to automatically restart the OLTP application
at the remote backup site. Acronis Backup and Recovery, which has no high availability feature, required the same 58 minutes as in the previous test to recover from the simulated disaster.
Ease of Use and Pricing
CA ARCserve’s well-formatted and configurable dashboard reveals, at a glance, the current status of your backups. Acronis Backup and Recovery also shows a
configurable dashboard display of backup/restore status information. If you have multiple site backups, both CA ARCserve and Acronis Backup and Recovery consolidate and centralize backup status information from all sites.
Data visibility is crucial to data backup reliability. CA ARCserve needs only a single click to display a clear and highly descriptive graphical view of backup sets and backed up data. Acronis Backup and Recovery requires considerable administrator manual input in order to show backup and restore status information.
CA ARCserve’s image-based backup component has a Web 2.0 interface that uses browser windows to provide real-time access to the latest documentation updates, invaluable technical data, helpful tips and online user communities. Impressively, CA ARCserve’s Web 2.0 interface even gives customers virtually direct access to the CA ARCserve development staff – and they actually listen to customer suggestions and
ideas. Acronis Backup and Recovery’s native, thick Windows client software is not as informative, as responsive or as intuitive to use as CA ARCserve’s.
CA ARCserve’s Web 2.0 interface has meaningful icons, a grasp-at-first-glance view of network objects and pop-up windows for object-specific tasks. It strategically uses multi-level drop-down menus and tabs to organize tasks in a way that aligns perfectly with a network administrator's workflow. Every backup and restore operation is within easy reach of just a few mouse clicks.
CA ARCserve makes extensive use of the Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) multipurpose browser-based framework of tools, widgets, controls and methods. CA ARCserve’s interface offers a rich set of widgets that resemble elements of native desktop applications. For example, it has built-in support for keyboard navigation, focus and tab handling and drag & drop. CA ARCserve’s Web 2.0 interface gave us the ability to remotely access all our protected servers, change configuration settings, check the status of our backups and restores, initiate backup jobs and launch remote recoveries – all via the Internet.
Acronis Backup and Recovery’s pricing is generally higher than that of CA ARCserve, as shown in the following tables. Note that CA ARCserve pricing includes maintenance. Acronis Backup and Recovery pricing does not.
Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5 Pricing
MSRP
Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 Advanced Server for Windows $1,399.00 Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 Advanced Server for Windows with
Microsoft SQL Server
$1,899.00 Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 Advanced Server for Linux $1,399.00 Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 Advanced Workstation $99.00 Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 for Microsoft Exchange Server $1,199.00 Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 Virtual Edition for Hyper-V $1,599.00 Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 Virtual Edition for RHEV $1,599.00 Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 Virtual Edition for Parallels $1,599.00 Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 Virtual Edition for Citrix XenServer $1,599.00 Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 Virtual Edition for VMware vSphere $1,799.00
Acronis Backup & Recovery Online 1.5 TB $1,129.00
for 1 year
Deduplication $249.00
CA ARCserve r16.5 Pricing
MSRP
CA ARCserve Backup for Windows $818.40/server
CA ARCserve D2D for Windows Server Standard Edition $732.00/server CA ARCserve Replication for Windows Standard OS with Assured
Recovery
$1,600.50/server CA ARCserve High Availability for Windows Standard OS with
Assured Recovery
$3,250.50/server CA ARCserve Backup for Windows Essentials File Server Module
with D2D and Replication
$2,005.20/server CA ARCserve Backup for Windows Standard Database Module with
D2D and Replication
$2,610.00/server CA ARCserve Backup Advanced Email Module with D2D and
Replication
$2,730.00/server CA ARCserve Backup for Windows Enterprise Application Module
with D2D and Replication
$3,228.00/server RPO Managed Capacity: Recover your data in minutes
CA ARCserve Backup + CA ARCserve D2D Advanced Server + Central Applications + file-only CA ARCserve Replication
$9,540/Terabyte
RTO Managed Capacity: Recover applications in seconds
CA ARCserve Backup + CA ARCserve D2D + Central Applications + CA ARCserve Replication + CA ARCserve High Availability
$16,740/Terabyte
Virtual Environment
RPO Per Socket Solution: Recover your data in minutes
CA ARCserve Backup + CA ARCserve D2D Advanced Server + Central Applications + file-only CA ARCserve Replication
$795/socket (unlimited cores)
Virtual Environment
RPO-RTO Per Socket Solution: Recover applications in seconds CA ARCserve Backup + CA ARCserve D2D +Central Applications + CA ARCserve Replication + CA ARCserve High Availability
$1,995/socket (unlimited cores)
All CA ARCserve pricing includes 1 year of Enterprise support/maintenance
Rankings Summary
Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5
CA ARCserve r16.5
Image-based backup 4.0 4.3
File-based backup 0.0 4.8
Replication, High Availability 0.0 4.9
Usability 4.5 4.5
Conclusion
CA ARCserve is an integrated, reliable, easy-to-use and scalable answer when disaster happens. CA ARCserve offers both comprehensive image-based and file-based
backup, performs backups and restores faster, and provides far greater uptime and availability. Moreover, CA ARCserve r16.5 costs less than Acronis Backup and Recovery 11.5.
Acronis Backup and Recovery can only create and manage image-based backup sets. It supports Linux as well as Windows, but its data deduplication and BMR are extra-cost options. It completely lacks CA ARCserve’s file-based backup, replication and high availability features.
Vendor Contacts
CA
800-225-5224 www.arcserve.comAcronis
877-485-3240 www.acronis.comTestbed and Methodology
Virtually all our testing took place across 512 kb/s frame relay, T1 and T3 WAN links. The testbed network consisted of six Fast Ethernet subnet domains routed by Cisco routers. Our lab's 150 clients consisted of computing platforms that included Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista/Win7, Macintosh 10.x and Red Hat Linux (both server and
workstation editions).
The relational databases on the network were Oracle, IBM DB2 Universal Database, Sybase Adaptive Server 12.5 and both Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and 2012. The network also contained two Web servers (Microsoft IIS and Apache), three e-mail servers (Exchange, Notes and Sendmail) and several file servers (Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 servers).
Our virtual computing environments consisted of VMware, XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.
A group of four Compaq Proliant ML570 computers, running Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2008 Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, was our test platform for all the products’ server components. A second group of four computers simulated our backup site for disaster recovery.
About the Author
Barry Nance is a networking expert, magazine columnist, book author and application architect. He has more than 29 years experience with IT technologies, methodologies and products. Over the past dozen years, working on behalf of Network Testing Labs, he has evaluated thousands of hardware and software products for ComputerWorld, BYTE Magazine, Government Computer News, PC Magazine, Network Computing, Network World and many other publications. He's authored thousands of magazine articles as well as popular books such as Introduction to Networking (4th Edition), Network Programming in C and Client/Server LAN Programming.
He's also designed successful e-commerce Web-based applications, created database and network benchmark tools, written a variety of network diagnostic software utilities and developed a number of special-purpose networking protocols.
You can e-mail him at [email protected].
About Network Testing Labs
Network Testing Labs performs independent technology research and product
evaluations. Its network laboratory connects myriads of types of computers and virtually every kind of network device in an ever-changing variety of ways. Its authors are
networking experts who write clearly and plainly about complex technologies and products.
Network Testing Labs' experts have written hardware and software product reviews, state-of-the-art analyses, feature articles, in-depth technology workshops, cover stories, buyer’s guides and in-depth technology outlooks. Our experts have spoken on a
number of topics at Comdex, PC Expo and other venues. In addition, they've created industry standard network benchmark software, database benchmark software and network diagnostic utilities.
