Arcserve UDP gains cloud capabilities via Zetta acquisition
Arcserve today acquired cloud provider Zetta, adding a direct-to-cloud disaster recovery and backup capability to expand its reach for service providers.
Arcserve, which spun out of CA Technologies in 2014, plans to integrate Zetta’s technology into the flagship Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) platform. The Zetta technology provides backup as a service (BaaS) and disaster recovery as a service for virtual and physical environments.
Arcserve will phase out the Zetta brand, calling its new BaaS capability Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct. Previously, Arcserve UDP required a two-step process to get data to the cloud. Backup had to be performed first on-premises before the data could be moved to the cloud.
“We had a similar capability with our on-premises [Arcserve UDP backup], but this takes us to the next level,” said Rick Parker, Arcserve’s chief marketing officer.
Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct will be available to the vendor’s North American partners on Aug. 14. The company sells directly through its 7,500 worldwide channel partners and 540 managed service providers (MSPs), while Zetta had a direct sales force.
“Not only from a feature perspective, but from a marketing and strategy perspective, Zetta gives them a lot of lift,” Jason Buffington, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said of Arcserve. “It’s giving customers a lot of flexibility.”
Andrew Smith, senior research analyst at IDC, said the Zetta technology should appeal to Arcserve’s MSP partners.
“This gives MSPs a new deployment mechanism,” he said. “MSPs have a lot of industry expertise in which they can build specific use cases.”
Acquisitions expand Arcserve’s capabilities
This is Arcserve’s second acquisition this year. In the first quarter of 2017, it acquired FastArchiver for on-premises or public cloud emails. Arcserve has not disclosed the financial details for either acquisition.
Zetta, which was founded in 2008, has 40 employees and 2,700 customers. Jeff Whitehead, Zetta’s chief technology officer, will take on the CTO role at Arcserve while Zetta CEO Mike Grossman “has moved on.”
The Zetta cloud offering boasts a five-minute recovery time objective and is optimized for data sets of up to 500 TB with unlimited scalability. It performs automated disaster recovery testing, and supports VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors.
Parker said one of Zetta’s key selling points was the ability to pre-configure and pre-provision the network, firewall and VPN connectivity. These functions are important for small to mid-level companies and distributed remote offices.
“They have very sophisticated IP to move data over networks,” he said. “They are very good at that. They also have one data center on the East Coast and one on the West Coast. What we have now is a very comprehensive cloud solution.”