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CA unveils first product under new BrightStor brand

By Denise Dubie
Network World Fusion, 07/12/01

Computer Associates at its annual users' conference Tuesday revealed the first in a series of new storage products it plans to offer customers in the coming year.

Company President and CEO Sanjay Kumar introduced BrightStor Enterprise Backup to CA World attendees and outlined his plan to aggressively "make a dent" in the storage software market with CA's newly branded BrightStor family of products. The company also plans to have a beta version of its storage-area network management product by this fall and will offer customers storage portal software in the next year.

"We're moving aggressively to show customers that dollar for dollar, CA's products will give them the best price for performance," Kumar told attendees. "We will erode Veritas' market share and revenue in this market."

CA's BrightStor Enterprise Backup is backup and recovery software that runs on Windows NT/2000, Sun Solaris and HP-UX platforms. It features a centralized management console that lets users manage all backup and recovery tasks on both Unix and Windows servers. The console also lets users group Windows NT/2000 and Unix servers into backup domains for consistent administration of backup policies and environment security, CA said.

To support other environments, the product has a suite of client agents that can run on Windows desktops, all flavors of Unix and Linux, NetWare, AS/400, and OpenVMS, CA said.

CA said Enterprise Backup is a complementary solution to its previous ArcServe product, which it is now positioning as a workgroup/departmental solution best for organizations with fewer than 20 servers. Enterprise Backup is more for large enterprises dealing with backing up several terabytes of data, CA said.

At the conference, Kumar invited EMC CEO Joe Tucci to discuss the companies' partnerships to develop storage products together. The companies announced BrightStor Enterprise Backup's integration with EMC's TimeFinder parallel processing software running on EMC Symmetrix information storage systems. Through this integration, customers will be able to better manage and protect their Windows NT/2000 data on EMC Symmetrix systems, the companies said.

Called BrightStor Enterprise Backup for EMC TimeFinder, the integrated package consists of a BrightStor Enterprise Backup server, client agents for Windows, a backup agent for Oracle, a tape library option, a SAN option and a serverless backup option, all of which facilitate data backup and recovery on Symmetrix systems. CA said it plans to offer products to work with EMC's Fastrax data movement platform later this year.

Michael Karp, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates, says CA has consistently offered more interoperability in its products, and that it's "well-positioned to provide soup-to-nuts storage" to customers. And because users spend much of their time performing backups, CA's Enterprise Backup could appeal to users.

For example, CA released test results from Doculabs, an independent analyst firm, that show the software sustains backup throughputs of about 1.5 terabytes of data per hour on Solaris and more than 1 terabyte of data per hour on HP-UX.

Robert Umphred, systems support manager for The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., currently uses ArcServe from CA, but said beta tests with Enterprise Backup show the product will give him the ability to share SAN devices and perform more consistent disaster recovery in his organization's heterogeneous environment. This is due to Enterprise Backup's cross-platform support as well as its multi-streaming feature, which lets users perform backups for multiple devices simultaneously. "Its multistream capabilities will save us hours of back-up time," Umphred says.

BrightStor represents the storage management piece of the four areas on which it says it will focus in the future. The other focus areas are: Unicenter-branded infrastructure management; eTrust-branded security management; and Jasmine-branded information management. The company says it defined brands to help customers better understand CA's more than 1,200 product offerings.

CA unveils first product under new BrightStor brand

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