Primary Advantages of Computer Associates ARCserve:
ARCserve has agents for a variety of platforms and applications.
ARCserve has a low, software-only entry price if features like virtualization, deduplication, and bare metal are not required to protect your environment.
ARCserve is ideal for storage specialists who want to focus on backup and to stitch together multiple storage, networking, and software components to create a solution that meets their needs. This goes against Unitrends’ value proposition, which states that the company would rather you focus on your business instead of on your backup.
Being part of the Computer Associates product portfolio, ARCserve can integrate and leverage other supplementary products in the CA suite.
Primary Disadvantages of Computer Associates ARCserve:
ARCserve licensing fees tend to be expensive for growing businesses due to the licensing model – charging on a per-feature, per-client, per-operating system, and the like basis.
ARCserve tends to have a lower ROI (Return on Investment) and higher TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) due to higher operational expenses of putting together, managing, and monitoring servers, storage, networks, operating systems, and data protection software.
The non-integrated nature of ARCserve leads to finger-pointing among the server, storage, networks, operating systems, and data protection software vendors when a problem occurs.
Setting up ARCserve for deduplication can be difficult in terms of balancing the software requirements with the hardware and operating system requirements of the system upon which the ARCserve software will operate.
Care must be taken when performing source-level deduplication (or for that matter, compression and/or encryption) using ARCserve on systems because of the load it places on those systems.
ARCserve data protection servers run on Windows; putting data protection software on Windows servers dramatically increases susceptibility to malware attacks.
