Since last we reviewed Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) Cloud Direct it’s seen several changes, including a refresh to its web interface so it’s easier to use and also supports custom branding. While this has certainly helped make this business cloud backup solution easier to use, it still has a sophisticated feature set that will likely make it most attractive to midsized and larger companies with dedicated IT personnel. In fact, its features are enough to qualify it as a full-on disaster recovery solution, though not all of those features are contained in one product. That, along with excellent reporting and restoration features, make this a well-earned Editors’ Choice winner along with Acronis Cyber Protect.
Arcserve UDP: Pricing and Plans
One downside to Arcserve that you’ll discover early on is its pricing. Unlike much of the small business-oriented competition, Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct isn’t based on transparent pricing tiers you’ll be able to find and sign up for on its website. Instead, Arcserve simply states the service begins at $50 per terabyte per month and requires at least a 50TB commitment. That’s well up from when we last reviewed it where its basic plan began at just 500GB. Beyond that, Arcserve operates like other enterprise-oriented software vendors, and requires a phone call with its sales reps to build an individual quote for each customer.
The cloud disaster recovery service is billed separately and has no minimum pricing that Arcserve is willing to share; again, you can only get a quote after detailing your particular needs to Arcserve’s sales staff. Note that if you want your business continuity capabilities tested out, then ask for it during the quote or trial signup process since it’s not available by default and requires additional consultation. Also, the company levies an additional monthly fee per virtual machine (VM) and daily spin-up charge when a VM is running. A free 15-day trial is available on the Arcserve website.
This murky pricing methodology is likely a holdover from older days. Arcserve is one of the of the more venerable data protection, replication, and recovery providers, having been in the tech business since 1983 when it was called Cheyenne Software, though it didn’t introduce its first backup product until 1990. That’s an important point, because Arcserve adds a lot of that experience into its products. Today, it’s one of the more sophisticated platforms you can purchase, which is definitely an important buying consideration. Despite its more intuitive interface, all those higher-end features mean this solution is still meant for larger businesses with dedicated IT staff. That makes it a very different beast from products such as CrashPlan for Small Business, which is usable by pretty much anyone. Potential customers need to test Arcserve’s capabilities thoroughly and make sure it’s what they want because aside from the price, there’s also a significant prep process and learning curve to get this platform fully implemented.
If you’re wondering about its added-cost disaster recovery capabilities, know that we didn’t test those as part of this review. However, Arcserve describes them as centered around its ability to replicate virtual infrastructure and perform backups and restores in highly distributed environments. That means your IT administrators will be able to control backups no matter where client devices are located and perform restores to any location and any supported target device in the event of a disaster. The service also backs up and replicates virtual infrastructure, meaning you’re not only backing up your virtual server instances with fast recovery points, you can replicate your whole network in the cloud and access it from anywhere there’s an internet connection in the event of a disaster.
Setup and User Interface
Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct’s web-based user interface has changed dramatically since we last reviewed it. The previous version, an offshoot of its acquisition of Zetta, didn’t look or feel like a very modern, web-native application. While it had plenty of features, the interface was organized haphazardly without much attention to efficient layout and design. Those issues have been addressed in the current version.
The new Arcserve UI is optimized for the web and it’s obvious the company has done a lot of work to make it clear and intuitive. It’s hinged on a left-hand navigation panel followed by another panel that changes dynamically to show users more specific features in the parent category. The main menu simply consists of the Monitor, Protect, Analyze, and Configure parent categories, each of which drills down into more specific capabilities.
The Monitor section provides a Source Summary, which is really a count of the number of devices on the account. A Cloud Usage Counter states how much storage you’ve used, and a Policy Summary lists any existing policies you’ve put in place as well as the success and failure rates of enforcing those policies (more on that below). Beneath that, you get the Backup Jobs Summary, which is a big picture overview of all ongoing or completed backups. Next to that is the recent 10 Jobs in Progress to give you an idea of which endpoints are being backed up. On the far right you get detailed notifications on missed backups, as well as the corresponding files or folders affected. IT professionals backing up larger endpoint groups have all the information they need stacked neatly on the page and will only rarely need to scroll further for deeper insight.
Installing backup agent software is usually one of the more challenging aspects of getting started with business cloud storage or backup. MSP360, for example, is another of the more comprehensive solutions we tested, and this showed not only in the client agent’s range of features but also its setup process, which can quickly overwhelm average users. Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct does a better job at getting new users up and running. Once you sign up online, you instantly get the installer downloaded on your PC, and this supports all the major desktop platforms, namely Apple macOS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows. IT professionals can also automate this installation across a larger user base.
For virtual infrastructure, Arcserve supports VMs created using either Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware’s ESXi platforms. You can also backup individual volumes mounted on your network, which not only makes designing a disaster recovery plan easier, but also means Arcserve can backup network attached storage (NAS) devices.
If you’re having users install the agent software themselves, those folks aren’t left in the lurch. There is an online installation guide as well as links to web support pages, an email address, a live chat window, or the option to call support by phone. We asked for help through Arcserve’s email address and got a response within a few hours.
Still, due to the highly customizable sales and installation process, most end users won’t be using Arcserve for direct support. Instead, you should make sure your IT staff has at least a basic help desk to act as front line support, since they’ll be the most familiar with exactly which Arcserve products you’ve got installed as well as their capabilities and distributed layout. You should have your users contact Arcserve directly only as a last resort.
Organization Through Policies
Once you’ve downloaded the clients and installed them on your endpoints, you’ll need to apply policies. Policies will determine what you want backed up and where you want that data stored. For SMBs, this might mean setting up your Windows endpoints to back up folders like Documents or Accounts but omit Downloads or Pictures if these aren’t relevant to the business. You’ve got good flexibility here with the ability to assign policies to different user or device groups setup around a variety of organizational criteria.
The type of policy applied will of course be determined by whether your business is after cloud backup or full disaster recovery. Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct can manage both, and they can coexist within the same interface (provided you’re also subscribing to the disaster recovery component, which, as mentioned above, costs extra). This means that you can backup the entire system for disaster recovery and also backup block level changes for less resource-intensive cloud backup needs.
Proper policy designation is about organizing and streamlining your backup process. This is important if you’re aiming Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct at large user groups in highly distributed locations (as many IT pros are doing today). It’s also the place where you organize your virtual infrastructure backups and your application-specific backup needs. Arcserve includes dedicated backup features for several Microsoft back office products, like Microsoft 365, Exchange Server, and SQL Server. Policies also help dictate where your backed up data will be stored.
During our testing period, we were given the option to use a 7-day cloud backup volume on Arcserve’s data centers and chose the New Jersey data center because it was closest to our physical location. Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct also has a data center in California and other locations. Backup admins can set a throttle in the event that clients are transmitting a large data set so as not to clog the network. Throttling is especially useful during the initial backup seeding process, especially if this is happening from a central office with lots of endpoints.
Backups at Your Fingertips
Scheduling backups in Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct is straightforward. Admins can schedule backups once per day at a specific time. The days and time are configurable, but multiple backups in the same day are not an option, outside of manually running a backup job. For subscribers of the DRaaS functionality, there’s a lot more leeway. You can enable backups every 15 minutes, every hour, or every six hours. This ensures that you’ve got files backed up as recently as possible in the event of a Bad Day.
Once your backup job is completed, you’ll get failure or success notifications automatically provided via email. Runtime metrics are available in the web dashboard under the Monitor section. Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct also provides various proactive alerts, again delivered via email, that can warn of backup problems or any restore operations that might be happening. You can select alerts for backup errors, missed backups, backup success, backup warnings, and other events.
File-based recovery is accessible via the web UI or a mapped Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) folder. This is handy and makes the process of retrieving backed up data fast and efficient. Secondly, if you’re capturing disk image backups, you can download these as a virtual hard drive (VHD) instance, then mount and launch it either in a hypervisor or as a bare metal restore operation.
Launching a VM is also a simple matter, assuming this feature has been requested in advance. To date, it requires intervention from a company technician, which means it’s not true automatic failover. However, the end result still lets you launch any enabled VMs with just a few clicks and some time.
Security and Encryption
Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct has a strong focus on data security, both on stored data as well as data moving between targets. However, it doesn’t offer built-in anti-malware and anti-ransomware functions like our other Editors’ Choice pick, Acronis Cyber Protect. Data is secured in transit by using encrypted protocols to protect against eavesdropping. All backups are also protected at rest by Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit encryption. Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct only uses data centers that are SAS 70 Type II- or SSAE 16 SOC2-compliant, which reflect best practices for administration operations. All this combines to let Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct serve customers who might be constrained by a variety of industry regulations, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), and Sarbanes–Oxley (SOX) requirements.
This security also doesn’t slow down backup operations. Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct backups happen fast, likely because the solution uses compression and sends only the block-level differences in the data set. Our Windows-based test laptop backup, consisting of 40GB worth of mixed data types, took a little under five hours on an overtaxed home network Internet connection. Restoring folders and files was similarly quick and trouble free. We restored files and folders successfully to our instigating backup device and then used the web interface to initiate restores remotely and to a different device. Everything worked smoothly.
Administrators can also elect to store backups somewhere locally, like a NAS device, in addition to the cloud. This is handy for scenarios in which cloud restore may not be an option, either due to compliance constraints or simply because a restore from the cloud wouldn’t be quick enough.
A Sophisticated Business Backup Solution
The new user interface with its improved ease of use, and especially its robust range of backup and recovery features, all make Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct a strong backup and data continuity contender. Though it lacks support for mobile devices, larger businesses and even growing enterprises will appreciate not only the deep feature set, but also that they can manage both backups and disaster recovery through a single service.
While it might wind up being a pricey option, depending on your particular needs, Arcserve is one of the most complete data protection platforms we tested. It’s worth noting again, however, that while we loved these features, buyers need to remember that the guts of the system are aimed at IT professionals, not general business users. If you’re a small business looking for an easy and automatic backup product that most anyone can configure, then you’re better off looking at products like Backblaze Business Backup or CrashPlan.
But if you’re a larger company with some IT resources and you’re looking for the best platform to keep your organization’s data and virtual infrastructure safe, both on-premises and in the cloud, then Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct is one of your best options, and easily earns our Editors’ Choice award.
