NEW YORK – CA has announced the release of CA ARCserve r15. The solution set includes CA ARCserve Backup – CA’s traditional offering in this space – two rebranded CA solutions, which are now ARCserve Replication and CA ARCserve High Availability, and an innovative new disk-to-disk backup and restore product, CA ARCserve D2D.

The ARCserve line has been retooled and refocused in the last two years, to reinvigorate an old channel product which had gone somewhat stale.

“When I took over two years ago, ARCserve Backup was a channel built product going in the wrong direction,” said Adam Famularo, senior vice president and general manager of CA’s Recovery Management and Data Modeling business unit. “We needed to get channel partners much more profitable selling our products.

To this end, CA upgraded the product, the way they managed its’ distribution, and the channel incentives for it.

“We determined to have a new release very year, and 12.5, the one before this, was a big one,” Famularo said. We introduced dedupe and other features that put them ahead of the competition. We also consolidated sales, marketing and support all in one unit. And we introduced new channel incentives, including a program to grandfather in partners who had been selling competitor products. I also believe if partners use a product internally, they will usually recommend it to customers, so we let partners use this for free.”

Famularo thinks CA ARCserve r15 (v13 and v14 fell victim to fear of unlucky numbers in North America and Asia respectively) is well poised to continue the momentum v 12.5 established.

“R15 has a brand new product, CA ARCserve D2D, a pure disk to disk backup product, which has three features above the competition,” Famularo said. It provides bare metal restoration to dissimilar hardware, and from physical to virtual, saving hours by allowing a crashed server to recover to a different type of machine. “It also has patent-pending I2 ( I Squared) block-level technology, which lets them do a full backup once and once they do that, they only have to do increments,” he said.

Famularo said they are stressing the way in which this product takes advantage of Web 2.0 to facilitate faster learning, easy access to more resources, and a better user experience for the administrator.

“We haveYoutube videos to deal with issues built right into the product,” Famularo said. “Web 2.0 sets us far ahead of our competition here. We’ve also added the ability for customers to speak to each other in user groups. And customers can provide feedback right to our developers, and they reply to the customers. In our beta process, we think this allowed us to push it out by four weeks.”

Famularo said that partners will have success selling the D2D product from this family into SMB customers which have existing backup solutions in place.

“The D2D product fits in well with competitor product, and avoids the need to rip and replace,” he said. “This is a more common thing in SMB compared to the enterprise. In the SMB what’s important is the cost and effectiveness of the product.”

The flagship product, CA ARCserve Backup, now combines innovative disk and tape backup features-including data deduplication, granular restore and infrastructure visualization-with state-of-the-art technologies . It facilitates granular restoration of Microsoft Active Directory to help save time and maximize flexibility for restores, and granular restoration of SharePoint to help speed recovery of critical business information within a SharePoint environment. Infrastructure Visualization supports efficient administration and system utilization by providing an easy-to-read network diagram view of the entire environment and a simple drill down on each component to check status, backup methodology, and other key information. Enhanced SRM Reporting now provides greater reliability and supports compliance with new reports that help ease management of the environment and enable proactive problem avoidance.

“CA has taken ARCserve Backup to yet another level with this new release, continuing to add very useful features, while improving ease-of-use and performance,” said Kernel Thomas, manager of networking services for TheStreet.com. “The improvements in user-friendliness and automation for daily maintenance tasks, as well as new alerts and features that help optimize backup scheduling, reaffirm CA ARCserve as the best way for us to ensure reliable backup and recovery of files, email and video across our physical and virtual servers.”

Joining the ARCserve family is CA ARCserve Replication is a rebranded CA solution – CA XOsoft Replication – which helps IT ensure continuous data protection, and fast and easy data migration at the data center and remote offices. Designed to complement any backup solution, it is quickly and easily deployed and managed through a unified, web-based console. It helps integrate application-aware replication and continuous data protection to help ensure the protection and recoverability of applications, files, emails and databases across Windows, Linux and UNIX in both physical and virtual environments.

It also helps customers migrate data from old servers to new servers, from physical servers to virtual servers, from remote offices to the data center, and from the data center to any remote location for disaster recovery. It helps IT ensure replicated data is available and recoverable when needed. Integrated VSS Snapshot Management enables application-consistent backups when used with CA ARCserve Backup, CA ARCserve D2D, or other commercial backup solutions.

CA ARCserve High Availability r15 is another rebranded CA product added to the ARCserve family. It was previously known as CA XOsoft High Availability. It helps maximize system, application and data uptime and availability to meet demanding service level agreements (SLAs) and disaster recovery strategies. It protects any Windows, Linux and UNIX file servers, applications or databases, including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, IIS, and Dynamics CRM, as well as Oracle and Blackberry Servers on physical and virtual servers. It includes all CA ARCserve Replication r15 features, and adds server and application-level monitoring, automated and push-button failover, and push-button failback. CA ARCserve Assured Recovery provides automated non-disruptive recovery testing to help ensure failover systems will work when needed.

“As a new CA reseller partner, we’re having a very good experience working with the company and are drawn to its products, like CA ARCserve Replication and CA ARCserve D2D, which are tremendous fits for the needs of our small-company customer base,” said Chris Porosky, president of Red Road Networks. “CA ARCserve D2D is a really powerful product on a lightweight footprint, coupling fast backup and bare metal restoration capabilities with support for virtualization, which will help customers get the most of out of IT environments that sometimes rely on just a single server.”

“It’s very refreshing to see a software company like CA put such effort into truly listening to customers and understanding their business needs – and this effort is plainly evident in the powerful products that make up the CA ARCserve r15 Family,” said Bob Venero, president and CEO of Future Tech Enterprise, a global value-added solutions provider. “Having taken a close look at this latest impressive release, we’re so convinced that businesses will share our excitement with the value delivered here that we are giving our qualified customers – new and existing alike – net 150 day terms on all products included in the CA ARCserve r15 family. We’re not a company that takes big risks, but we’re willing to bet big on the exceptional value proposition that CA and the ARCserve r15 release brings to the table.”

Finally, while ARCserve is not yet avail