Our quest to find the best backup/restore, disaster recovery, replication and business continuity product looks at the latest versions of CA ARCserve (r16) and Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability (v6.0).
Executive Summary The highly customer-oriented CA ARCserve r16 protects data in a wide variety of ways. In addition to delivering comprehensive replication and superior high availability, it also offers file- and image-based backup. The result? CA ARCserve meets or exceeds a full gamut of RTO and RPO goals, ranging from once-a-week or once-a-day backup to true continuous data protection with nearly-instant failover. CA ARCserve’s advanced high availability technology makes full system- and service-oriented replication/failover easy and worry-free, and it gives you foolproof non-disruptive BMR failback. In comparison, Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability 6.0 is cumbersome, error-prone and incomplete. Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability’s limited repertoire includes just replication and offers only rudimentary high availability. CA ARCserve is our choice as the better answer for those organizations needing quality replication for offsite disaster recovery and maximum high availability for business continuity. Because CA ARCserve also offers file- and image-based backup technologies, customers don’t have to buy and use multiple vendors’ products to protect all the data a company owns. CA ARCserve r16 has again earned the Network Testing Labs World Class Award for best data protection and best business continuity. CA ARCserve r16 and Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability v6.0 both offer to protect and preserve your data using a variety of approaches. Both have many features to tempt organizations needing to protect critical data from failures, disasters and human mistakes. How do CA ARCserve r16 and Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability v6.0 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 and Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability v6.0. In this report, we compare and contrast the two products, feature by feature.
Disclosure: Production of this report funded by CA, Inc.
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CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability performs replication and offers high availability, but Double-Take Availability does not pretend to do image-based or file-based backup and recovery. Accordingly, we’ve had to assign Double-Take Availability zero scores within those two sections of this report. CA ARCserve’s components are CA ARCserve Replication (for disaster recovery), CA ARCserve High Availability (for rapid system failover and business continuity), CA ARCserve Backup (file-based) and CA ARCserve D2D (image-based). Vision Solutions offers four editions of Double-Take Availability for Windows – Foundation, Standard, Advanced and Premium. Vision Solutions also offers Standard, Advanced and Premium editions of Double-Take Availability Virtual Host. Vision Solutions sells Double-Take Availability for both AIX and Linux, and Vision Solutions also licenses RecoverNow (replication suitable for low-bandwidth situations), Share (database replication between multiple instances of a database) and Move (a utility for migrating data between servers or between servers and the cloud).
CA ARCserve r16’s New Features
Replication and High Availability Enhancements
Full System Protection and BMR – Replicates a complete physical or virtual Windows system (operating system, system state, applications and data) to an offline virtual server, monitors the system and application in real-time and offers both automatic and push-button failover for high availability. To quickly recover the original production server, you get hardware-independent BMR recovery and non-disruptive resynchronization for failback – with no business downtime
Amazon Cloud (Amazon Web Services [AWS] and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud [Amazon EC2]) Integration – Use Amazon’s data center resources to have a cloud-based Replica server
Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster Support – Complements a Windows Server failover cluster with data replication to any local or remote site; integrated with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager
Secure Communication – 128-bit Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption (no virtual private network (VPN) or IPSec tunnel necessary)
Network Address Translation (NAT) Support – Allows continuous, scheduled remote replication in NAT environments through a firewall – no VPN needed
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CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
Integrated Access to Cloud Storage – Integrated configuration of the cloud connection to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Microsoft Windows Azure storage and Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform
Backup Throttling – Optimizes the resources allocated to each backup
Granular Mailbox Recovery – Restores individual Exchange emails, attachments, files and folders from a single-pass backup
Desktop/Laptop Protection – Performs Infinite Incremental snapshot backups and bare-metal restores for your desktops and notebooks
Encryption – Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-128, AES-192 and AES-256 encryption for privacy and confidentiality
Windows Explorer Shell Integration – Navigate and manipulate recovery points directly from within Windows Explorer
Auto Update – Downloads and painlessly installs the latest ARCserve updates, hot fixes and service packs
Central Protection Manager – Web-based console for viewing and managing all protected servers and clients has automated Active Directory discovery, remote deployment, simplified policy-based administration, Storage Resource Manager (SRM) reporting, status, grouping, search and restore, basic workflow and event logging as well as centralized manual backups, job status reporting and monitoring across all protected machines
Central Reporting – Centralized, detailed reporting, with a customizable dashboard, for all devices, settings and policies (local and remote)
Central Host-Based VM Backup – Backs up all Windows-based VMs on a host in a single pass
Central Virtual Standby – Transforms image-based backups into runnable VMware Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) or Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) virtual server format and automatically registers them with the appropriate hypervisor for immediate failover in the event a production server fails (includes a “heartbeat monitor” for automatic failover)
Higher Integration – Add image-backup protected servers to the file-backup Manager catalog, migrate image-based recovery points to tape and retrieve those recovery points directly from tape, replicate recovery points offsite and retrieve the offsite data as if it were local
Pre-flight Check -- Tests and analyzes that the VMware environment is appropriately configured prior to running a backup and provides insight by suggesting changes to help ensure a successful backup
SQL Server 2012 Certification
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CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
Archive Manager – Identify and migrate data that meets specific archiving policies to less expensive storage to reduce storage costs while addressing compliance requirements
Integrated Cloud Storage – Configure and use cloud storage for offsite data protection, archiving and system availability for business continuity and disaster recovery
Snapshot and File-level Integration – Use combinations of image backups and file backups to restore specific data
Synthetic Full Backup Improvements – Use computing resources frugally yet transparently to store incremental backups
Backup Images to Tape – Copy disaster recovery disk images to tape for secondary storage
WinPE (Windows Preinstallation Option)-compliant Disaster Recovery – Use Microsoft’s WinPE technology to drive bare-metal restore operations
Improved Tape Management – Maximize and consolidate both disk and tape storage to lessen computing resource usage
SaaS Data Protection – Image-based backup, restore and system recovery and comes bundled and integrated with Microsoft Windows Azure cloud storage
Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability v6.0 New Features
Simplified GUI – Automated setup and management features
Plug-and-Play Protection – An available Universal Virtual Recovery Appliance (Vision Solutions server) replication target for physical or virtual environments
Real-Time Replication – Byte-level input/output operation mirroring replicates data continuously, in real time
No-Downtime Migrations – Whole-system data movement from a production environment to a target environment
Platform Independence – Supports Windows, Linux, AIX and others
Unified Console – Uses a central console to manage and monitor backup operations
The categories we used in this evaluation are: Replication/high availability features Image-based backup features File-based backup features
We also discuss pricing and usability.
Network Testing Labs
CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
For each feature, we rank the products and we explain the rankings when they’re dissimilar. In the first features table, let’s examine the differences between CA ARCserve and Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability in the areas of replication and high availability.
Replication and High Availability A Replication process 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 (provided that all byte-level changes made on the master computer are successfully transmitted across the LAN or WAN to the replica). 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. Failover can be set to occur automatically or manually using “push-button” failover. Users are then automatically redirected to the replica as part of the failover process. The result is a file, application or database server that’s always available. Multiple master and replica computers are possible, and Replication can be configured for one-to-one, many-to-one and one-to-many scenarios.
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CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
Replication and High Availability Features Comparison Table (Scoring from 0 to 5, with 5 the highest)
Feature
Vision Solutions Double-Take
Availability 6.0
CA ARCserve r16
Replication 5 5
True high availability (hot failover) 4 5
Failback 1 5
Server support 5 5
Operating System and application support
5 5
RTO/RPO (for disaster recovery)
4
5
Cloud support 3 4
Continuous Data Protection (CDP) 3 5
Offline synchronization 5 5
Replication and HA recovery testing 5 5
Network optimization 5 5
Backup integration 0 4
Assessment mode utility 5 5
Application aware replication 5 5
Replication and high availability features aggregate ranking
3.9
4.9
Replication and High Availability Notes CA ARCserve’s replication component and Double-Take Availability’s replication component have similar features and functions. However, because it monitors Windows Services, can perform a full-system Bare Metal Restore (BMR) and comes with many
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CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
pre-built HA templates, CA ARCserve’s High Availability component is far better at providing true continuous data protection than is Double-Take Availability. CA ARCserve’s replication component and Double-Take Availability can migrate backups offsite on either a scheduled basis or in a real-time, continuous manner. Both CA ARCserve’s and Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability’s replication components perform asynchronous replication and support Windows, Linux and UNIX environments. They may be deployed onsite, offsite and/or linked to a cloud. Basically, CA ARCserve’s and Double-Take Availability’s replication features clone each I/O operation and send the cloned copy to a secondary destination of your choice. Both CA ARCserve and Double-Take Availability can replicate between physical and virtual servers or between multiple virtual servers (P2P, P2V, V2P and V2V). For companies needing maximum system uptime and availability, CA ARCserve offers High Availability (HA). While Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability can replicate data in real time, its high availability feature is limited, as explained below. 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 if he or she deems it necessary. Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability’s HA feature can detect a server failure to know when to trigger its disaster recovery process, but it does not monitor individual background services. In our tests, we forced various software failures of Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server by, for example, confronting SQL Server with a disk-full situation. CA ARCserve noted the problem and quickly and painlessly switched database connections to a replica server (which had plenty of disk space). To our disappointment, Double-Take Availability didn’t notice the problem and did not automatically fail over to a replica server. To its credit, when Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability did detect a server failure, it automatically activated the replica server with alacrity. It re-assigned IP addresses and host names to make the “hot failover” completely transparent to the server’s users. Optionally, an administrator can manually trigger this process. CA ARCserve monitors a single server, group of servers, entire server farm or – uniquely – specific applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, IIS and Dynamics CRM, thus ensuring maximum availability. When a hardware or
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CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
application failure occurs, CA ARCserve can automatically activate the replica server(s), or failover can be set for manual/push-button failover. 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. Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability’s server-oriented approach to HA does not have CA ARCserve’s all-encompassing group management capability. Both CA ARCserve and Double-Take Availability offer push-button (administrator-initiated) failover, but the two products differ considerably in how they do failback (putting the production server back to work and reverting the replica server to its secondary role). CA ARCserve’s HA component offers a “Full System Protection” feature that replicates an entire Windows-based system (including operating system, system state, application and data) to a virtual server. After the initial synchronization, thereafter only byte-level changes are transmitted to the replica server. This feature is extremely valuable when deploying HA to a remote site, such as a remote data center, remote office, MSP facility or public cloud. After a failover, perfectly transparent and non-disruptive full-system failback is easy and quick because CA ARCserve can perform a Bare Metal Restore (BMR) (for which the target machine’s hard drive doesn’t even need to have Windows already installed on it). An administrator simply boots the repaired production server (or, at the administrator’s choice, a new physical or virtual server) with a BMR disk. He or she then initiates a non-disruptive reverse synchronization from the replica server. End-users continue to use the replica server during this process so you experience no business downtime whatsoever as you revert the replica server from a primary role to a secondary role and put the (new or repaired) production server back to work. Note that the CA ARCserve failback server does not have to be the same size, run on the same platform or even use the same virtual technology as the original production server. CA ARCserve thus offers the utmost in flexibility, simplicity and cost savings in a high availability environment.
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CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
The Double-Take Availability failback procedure is time-consuming, tedious and error-prone. Your users will suffer some downtime during the process. Failback with Double-Take Availability involves 16 complicated and error-prone manual steps. In contrast, a CA ARCserve administrator takes just three simple, easy steps to perform a failback operation. After resychronizing the (new) master server with the replica server, an administrator just clicks the Perform Switchover button (or selects the Perform Switchover option from the Tools menu). Voila. Task done. Figure 1 graphically illustrates the user downtime difference between CA ARCserve and Double-Take Availability when an administrator performs a failback operation. For this test, we simulated the failure of the hard disk in a server running Microsoft Exchange on Windows Server 2003. Failover to a Replica server occurred automatically and quickly. However, once we replaced the Production server’s hard drive, we found that getting the repaired Production server ready to resume its work took over an hour – 65 and one half minutes – with Double-Take Availability. Installing and configuring Windows Server took much of this time. Impressively, CA ARCserve’s BMR and push-button failback features allowed us to put the Production server back to work in under 22 minutes, with no user downtime whatsoever. Double-Take Availability failback required an extra 44 minutes, and, for 9 minutes of this time, no server was available to users. Figure 1. CA ARCserve r16 vs. Double-Take Availability 6.0 failback times
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CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
A Double-Take Availability administrator must take the following steps during the user downtime period shown in Figure 1:
Deny user access to the target
Stop all applications on the target
Change the source IP address back to its original value
Change the source name back to its original value
Reboot the servers
Re-home the informational store databases to the source
Open a DOS Prompt window and run the post-restore command line .BAT file
Restart Outlook clients The CA ARCserve administrator has none of these downtime steps to hurry through because CA ARCserve has no downtime during a failback operation. In summary, Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability cannot perform a full-system failback and, moreover, Double-Take Availability does not even offer BMR. 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. Furthermore, the CA ARCserve high availability component supports virtually all third party or in-house-developed Windows-based applications – administrators can easily create custom scenarios that specify which application services to monitor. Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability lacks this sophisticated template approach to setting up and configuring HA. Both Double-Take Availability and CA ARCserve offer replication and high availability for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. Both also support Windows server 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 hardware, application and data levels on the replica server, without affecting the production server or impacting the continuous data protection and monitoring. Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability has a similar tool. Similarly, both allow administrators to throttle the replication process to avoid network bandwidth overutilization.
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CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
When we measured RTO/RPO by performing a disaster recovery test with CA ARCserve’s High Availability component and Double-Take Availability, both were able to automatically restart the remote site application within six seconds. Both CA ARCserve’s and Double-Take Availability’s cloud connectivity works with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to provide physical-to-cloud backup migration, replication and high availability. However, CA ARCserve additionally offers unique full system protection replication and failover with non-disruptive BMR failback to cloud-connected users. The following feature chart reveals how well CA ARCserve fares in producing – and recovering from – image-based backups. Note that Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability does not offer image-based backup.
Image-based Backup An image-based full system backup contains everything about a computer at the moment the backup copy (i.e., snapshot) 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.
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CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
Image-based Backup Notes Note that Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability earned a score of zero in this category. It does not perform image-based backups. Double-Take Availability cannot, for example, do a Bare Metal Restore (BMR) after you replace a server’s (or client’s) failed hard drive. Technology – CA ARCserve uniquely offers synthetic backups, in which a full backup is assembled, or synthesized, from a baseline full backup and subsequent incremental backups. CA ARCserve’s image-based backup is built on its patent-pending Infinite Incremental (I2 Technology). With I2, users can do a full backup initially and then only perform incremental backups from that point forward. This technology leverages Windows VSS and 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. CA ARCserve r16 can create snapshots as often as every 15 minutes, and its backup targets can be just about any device. However, CA ARCserve’s image-based component does not offer data deduplication. Operating Systems; BMR – CA ARCserve can restore Windows images onto similar or dissimilar hardware through BMR. The recovery includes everything existing on the computer at the time of the latest image snapshot … the operating system, applications, data files and even the system state. Server and Client Support – CA ARCserve protects both Windows servers and Windows workstations (clients). Cloud Support – CA ARCserve writes initial snapshot (backup) to disk. A subsequent step copies the snapshot data to a cloud. CA ARCserve’s image-based backup works with Amazon Web Services as well as Microsoft Windows Azure and Eucalyptus to store secondary or tertiary image backups. After the first image copy to the cloud, CA ARCserve transmits only incremental changes (via I2) from that point forward. This makes the best use of low-speed cloud connections. Also, CA ARCserve offers a SaaS subscription service with integrated Windows Azure cloud storage. Performance and Media Usage – CA ARCserve’s I2 is a fast, storage-frugal approach to backup and recovery. Figure 2 shows the performance of CA ARCserve r16 I2 for a single server containing 300 GB.
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CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
Figure 2. CA ARCserve I2‘s impressive image-based backup/restore performance
Furthermore, in our testing of CA ARCserve’s infinite incrementals (one full backup at the outset and incremental backups thereafter), we saw that CA ARCserve’s I2 needed just 161 GB of storage space when we tested the creation of daily, weekly and monthly backups over a three-month time span. Virtualization Support -- CA ARCserve supports several virtualization platforms: VMware ESX and vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Redhat KVM. Furthermore, CA ARCserve protects the entire hypervisor host, which means that CA ARCserve can recover an entire virtual host as a single entity. 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. Impressively, CA ARCserve’s virtual standby works in either physical-to-virtual (P2V) or virtual-to-virtual (V2V) failover modes.
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CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
RTO/RPO Performance Testing – To measure CA ARCserve’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. CA ARCserve took snapshots every fifteen minutes and transferred backups 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, 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.
Note that the testing depicted earlier in Figure 2 occurred on a single computer, while our RTP/RPO testing used two sets of four computers. Also, the earlier charts show only the time to complete a backup job. They do not include times for other disaster recovery tasks such as restarting applications.
Central Management – Working with disk images is easy and painless with CA ARCserve's Web 2.0-based management console. The sophisticated and advanced GUI has a configurable dashboard display, it offers quick access to backup/recovery status information, it’s intuitive and responsive and the CA ARCserve console centrally manages activities and schedules for all backup servers. CA ARCserve also integrates with Windows Explorer to show the contents of an image file as a mountable drive letter. Central Reporting – CA ARCserve’s Central Reporting produces useful and informative reports regarding disk image recovery points, and CA ARCserve has easy-to-understand, at-a-glance reports for backup job monitoring and capacity planning.
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CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
Granular Recovery – CA ARCserve can recover entire SQL Server databases or other file-level objects, and it offers fine granularity with respect to Microsoft Exchange databases – mailboxes, e-mail notes and attachments. Not all IT organizations use image-based backup technology and many still rely on file-based backup, especially if they want to use a direct-to-tape backup strategy. In the last section, we had planned to compare CA ARCserve and Double-Take Availability file-based backup and restore capabilities, but Double-Take Availability does not offer file-based backup. Double-Take Availability scored zero in the file-based features and functions category.
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.
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CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
CA ARCserve r16 has a wealth of file-based backup features. Moreover, it’s fast, reliable and frugal in its use of storage space, offering built-in data deduplication at no additional cost. Because it’s integrated with CA ARCserve’s image-based backup/recovery component, you can migrate image-based backups to tape for archive and compliance purposes. CA ARCserve supports a myriad of operating systems, applications and backup devices, including tape and Virtual Tape Library (VTL). CA ARCserve has superior reporting, its infrastructure visualization feature is unequalled 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.
Ease of Use and Pricing Replication and High Availability –Both CA ARCserve’s High Availability component and Double-Take Availability have a single user interface window through which administrators can manage replication and high availability. If you have multiple site backups, both CA ARCserve and Double-Take Availability consolidate and centralize replication status information from all sites. However, with Double-Take Availability, visualizing replication status requires several more navigations steps than with CA ARCserve. Double-Take Availability’s user interface, which is not intuitive and which requires much more user input to accomplish the same tasks, pales in comparison. Double-Take’s user interface is a “thick” Windows client console. This Windows application has on its left four push buttons labeled Monitor, Protect, Recover and View Point In Time. You use these buttons to tell the Double-Take backup console what to show on the right side of the screen. For example, clicking Monitor displays a list of currently-running backup jobs. If no jobs are running, the display is perfectly blank.
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CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
We found navigating Double-Take Availability’s thick Windows console interface to be time-consuming and tedious. Moreover, the Double-Take thick Windows console was not as quick and responsive as we would’ve liked. CA ARCserve’s Replication and High Availability user interface has both menus and toolbars (Standard and Viewing) for managing your replication and high availability environments. The management console shows existing scenarios and their replication trees. It identifies each protected application (such as Exchange and SQL Server), along with other detail (such as server names, IP addresses, Windows Service status, files in use, disk space used, disk space available, and replication/high availability status) regarding that application. We especially liked that an administrator can easily customize the CA ARCserve replication/high availability management console to show exactly what he or she needs to see. Image-based Backup – Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability has no image-based capability, and thus lacks a user interface for this function. CA ARCserve’s image-based backup component has a browser-based Web 2.0 interface that provides 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. 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 one or 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 a browser window, over the Internet. File-based Backup – Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability has no file-based capability, and thus lacks a user interface for this function.
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CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
CA ARCserve’s user interface for its file-based operations is task-oriented, intuitive and easy to navigate. It centrally manages both primary and secondary backup servers, and administrators have a responsive, at-a-glance window into backup job status, job history and activity log entries. Using CA ARCserve’s central console, an administrator can perform backup job management operations (such as backup, restore, merge, scan, data migration, tape copy, compare, copy, count, etc.) on all ARCserve servers from the primary server. When a backup job completes, its final status (and that of any job that ran in the domain) is displayed by the Job Status Manager. Data visibility is crucial to data backup reliability. With a single click, CA ARCserve displays a clear and highly descriptive graphical view of backup sets and backed up data. CA ARCserve’s Device Manager shows information about storage devices connected to a server, the media in these devices and the status of these devices. The Device Manager module also allows you to format, erase, inventory, import, and export media. With central device management, all of these functions can be performed from the primary server for devices connected to the primary server or any of the associated member servers. Impressively, CA ARCserve’s well-formatted and configurable dashboard reveals, at a glance, the current status of your backups. CA ARCserve gives administrators easy access to backup environment information and displays useful SRM data. It graphically monitors the status of all backup activities so an administrator can quickly and surely find the nodes that are taking the longest, locate backed up data, discover if data is encrypted and ready for disaster recovery and track volume, disk and memory usage on each production server. CA ARCserve has a three-tier architecture that allows administrators to manage, modify and control backup and restore jobs, media devices, activity logs, alerts, catalogs, product licensing and reports from a single point that spans local and remote servers and locations. CA ARCserve file-based component is integrated with both the Replication component and the High Availability component. Administrators appreciate this component integration because they can browse and back up replicated data, restore data to the production or replica server, create synthetic full backups and view CA ARCserve Replication and HA reports. For other tasks, the administrator can run the CA ARCserve Replication and HA user interface from within the file-based CA ARCserve component. CA ARCserve automatically detects the existence of a tape library and configures it. Tape library settings can be changed on the fly for such tasks as cleaning tapes or specifying cleaning settings. CA ARCserve also automatically detects the presence of a
Network Testing Labs
CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
SAN and configures it automatically. Libraries are automatically detected as “shared” on the fly at the CA ARCserve Backup domain primary server. Domain primary servers can have both SAN and non-SAN domain member servers. CA ARCserve and Double-Take are competitively priced, as shown in the following tables. For some configurations, CA ARCserve costs less. And note that CA ARCserve offers image-based and file-based backup/recovery components that Double-Take lacks. Note too that CA ARCserve offers component-, server- and capacity-based pricing.
Vision Solutions Double-Take Pricing
MSRP Double-Take Availability for Windows (Foundation) $1,995
Double-Take Availability for Windows (Standard) $3,295
Double-Take Availability for Windows (Advanced) $5,495
Double-Take Availability for Windows (Premium) $9,125
Double-Take Backup Agent with Exchange Recovery $1,995
Double-Take Availability Virtual Edition for Windows $226 per VM
Double-Take Availability Virtual Host for Windows (Standard) $1,995
Double-Take Availability Virtual Host for Windows (Advanced) $2,995
Double-Take Availability Virtual Host for Windows (Premium) $4,995
Double-Take Availability for AIX $13,500
Double-Take Availability for Linux $3,295
Double-Take RecoverNow for Windows Agent $1,995
Double-Take RecoverNow for Windows Repository $1,995
Double-Take Share $10,000
Double-Take Move for Windows $295 per use
* Includes one year of maintenance
CA ARCserve r16 Pricing MSRP CA ARCserve Replication for Windows Standard Edition with Assured Recovery
$1600.50/server
CA ARCserve Replication for Windows Enterprise Edition with Assured Recovery
$2500.30/server
CA ARCserve Replication for Windows Cluster Resource Group with Assured Recovery
$2000.90/server
CA ARCserve Replication for Windows Virtual Machine with Assured Recovery
$950.00/VM
CA ARCserve Replication for Windows Virtual Machine with Assured Recovery (5 Pack)
$2850.01/pack
CA ARCserve Replication for Windows VM Protection with Assured Recovery (Per Host)
$2743.40/host
CA ARCserve Replication for Linux Server $1600.50/server
Network Testing Labs
CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
Conclusion CA ARCserve clearly has many strengths in replication and high availability and offers greater uptime and availability for your critical servers, applications and data. Furthermore, CA ARCserve has capabilities that Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability completely lacks, such as image-based and file-based backup. CA ARCserve is an integrated, reliable, easy-to-use and scalable answer when disaster happens. In addition to uniquely offering both comprehensive file-based and image-based backup, CA ARCserve gives you much better SRM reporting and has an easier-to-use, task-oriented user interface. As icing on the cake, in many cases, CA ARCserve r16 costs less than Vision Solutions Double-Take Availability 6.0. We recommend CA ARCserve without reservation. In fact, we use it in our own shop.
Network Testing Labs
CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
Testbed 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.
Network Testing Labs
CA ARCserve r16 vs. Product Double-Take Availability 6.0 Review
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.
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.
