News from Arcserve that they’re acquiring Zetta, one of the vendors promising to bring disaster recovery, kicking and screaming, into the cloudy world.

Arcserve is a data protection and availability vendor that was launched way back in the dark ages (1990 to be precise). Originally launched as a product under the umbrella of Cheyenne Software, Arcserve was spun out in 2014 when it released its first offering, Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP), which promised to deliver backup and recovery across cloud, virtual and physical environments under one pane of glass.

Today Arcserve has grown to cover the full gamut of disaster recovery, backup and archiving offerings, delivered both on-premises or in the cloud. The company has 7,500 distributors, resellers and service providers and services a customer base that covers 45,000 end users.

So given that Arcserve already did it all, why the acquisition? Well Zetta was founded with the idea of being cloud-first and offering a disaster recovery solution that wasn’t simply an on-premises tool ported to the cloud, but rather a product with a singular focus of enabling cloud DR. Via its as-a-service backup and DR solutions, Zetta promises highly available recovery solutions without the requirement for any hardware.

Promising complete Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery

With the purchase of Zetta, Arcserve’s is rolling up the Zetta products into its flagship Unified Data Protection (UDP) solution suite and adding the Zetta offering to its Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct tool. Arcserve currently offers its cloud service through UDP in a hybrid backup model, whereby users automatically replicate backup images from an on-premise recovery point server (RPS) to a corresponding RPS in the cloud (disk-to-disk-to-cloud). By converging direct-to-cloud and hybrid cloud technologies into one solution, customers will be able to implement on-premises, hybrid cloud and direct to cloud from a single point.

Arcserve suggests that the Zetta rollup will help it target four specific use cases and customer groups:

  • Businesses who need a quick cloud on-ramp without on-premise hardware requirements, such as in branch or small offices where on-premise may not be desired or practical
  • Users who want a seamless cloud networking, automation and management platform, and who wish to automatically and securely move large volumes of data over networks to data centers worldwide
  • Organizations with systems that cannot tolerate downtime and want to benefit from rapid push-button failover of an entire IT environment in minutes, industry-leading cloud backup speeds and 100 percent recoverability with validated data integrity
  • Channel partners looking to efficiently and profitably adopt and manage cloud offerings, with features such as multitenancy, multi-customer administration, tracking, and invoicing

MyPOV

Cloud changes things. And moving to a cloud DR and backup world isn’t simply a case of pointing data to a cloud-based destination point. It really is about embracing new technology approaches and, perhaps more importantly, but business models. Zetta gained good traction but, perhaps more importantly, gained a good knowledge base around how business in the cloud works differently from more traditional models. Arcserve is not only getting itself some technology but is also acquiring a good dose of smarts that will help it continue to execute as cloud becomes the default.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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