Arcserve N-series Integrates Data Protection, Nutanix HCI, Sophos Security

‘We’re delivering a secure backup and recovery environment with the scale-out power of HCI. We’re partnering with the leading HCI infrastructure provider and with a leading security provider to protect data on top of our leading backup technology, which has been proven for decades,’ says Ahsan Siddiqui, Arcserve’s director of product management.

Data protection software developer Arcserve Tuesday unveiled a new technology partnership with hyper-converged infrastructure pioneer Nutanix and endpoint protection technology developer Sophos to build a new series of enterprise-class appliances for integrated backup, recovery, and ransomware protection.

Those new appliances, dubbed the N-series and sold by Arcserve via its channels, combine Arcserve’s UDP data protection technology, the Nutanix Mine open platform for private cloud storage, and Sophos Intercept X Advanced for Server machine learning-based software for protecting against malware.

The goal of the N-series is to provide data protection to enterprises with hyper-converged infrastructure, or HCI, environments, said Ahsan Siddiqui, director of product management for Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Arcserve.

[Related: Arcserve, StorageCraft To Merge, Create Data Protection Powerhouse]

“We’re delivering a secure backup and recovery environment with the scale-out power of HCI,” Siddiqui told CRN. “We’re partnering with the leading HCI infrastructure provider and with a leading security provider to protect data on top of our leading backup technology, which has been proven for decades.”

The new Arcserve N-series is the third in a line of data protection appliances the company is currently selling and expects to continue selling for the foreseeable future, Siddiqui said. The company’s 9000 series provides up to 168 Tbytes of useable capacity for SMB backup and disaster recovery, and the X-series provides over 1 petabyte of capacity for data backups.

This is the first time Arcserve has partnered with a hyper-converged infrastructure vendor to develop an integrated offering, although Arcserve in the past supported file protection for Nutanix clients and supported Nutanix as a backup target, Siddiqui said.

The N-series includes Arcserve’s full UDP technology to protect data from any sources, making it useful for businesses using Nutanix HCI as their primary infrastructure and those running VMware or other environments looking for a scalable data protection offering, he said.

“Our technology is an easy add-on for customers running Nutanix, or looking for backups powered by a reliable HCI platform,” he said.

The Arcserve integration with Nutanix is similar to what other data protection technology developers including Veeam, HYCU, and Commvault have done, but it goes a step further, Siddiqui said.

“We’re making it a single SKU [stock keeping unit] with a single price and single support, and adding Sophos,” he said.

It is good to see vendors acknowledge the strengths of other vendors instead of always trying to do everything on their own, said Jonathan Berger, vice president of digital strategy at BlueAlly, a Cary, N.C.-based solution provider, which earlier this year purchased Virtual Graffiti where Berger previously worked.

“Such partnerships also makes our lives easier,” Berger told CRN. “When customers call Virtual Graffiti and ask for help, we have to put together solutions with multiple vendors and get multiple quotes. Integrated solutions makes things easier for channel partners.”

There are a lot of different data protection offerings in the market including for HCI environments, said Dean Cohen, storage sales manager at BlueAlly.

“Arcserve is telling us to work with Sophos and with Nutanix on HCI,” Cohen told CRN. “Having choices like this is important as customers start to move away from depending on the cloud because of all the user fees.”

The Arcserve N-series is available only through Arcserve’s two-tier channel, and provides partners with margins on the Arcserve software and the Nutanix Mine licensing, Siddiqui said. It is slated to ship by the end of the first week in September, he said.