Product Reviews

The battle between Veritas and Computer Associates (CA) for the small- to mid-range backup market is now a tradition. This latest version of CA's ARCserve Backup for Windows looks likely to rock the competition as it offers a wealth of new features.

Simplifying the installation routine has been a key focus, although there's little CA can do to make it any easier. You can install the base product locally, remote installations can be streamlined with a response file for deployment on multiple servers, and workstation agents can also be remotely pushed to selected systems. The licensing process has been smoothed out, with ARCserve stepping you through a questionnaire allowing each selected component to be configured ready for use. CA has resisted the urge to tamper with the main administrative interface so it has remained consistent ever since its introduction in ARCserve 2000. A small amount of cosmetic surgery is evident, but if you're familiar with previous versions you won't have any problems with this one.

Backups are simple to run - ARCserve still adheres to the same basic three-step manoeuvre for selecting the source, destination and scheduling options. A new pre-flight check can be used to verify that a job will work correctly before it's submitted, and

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backup media support is now extended to WORM (write once/read many) for archiving purposes. Security gets a boost with session password protection, plus data can now be kept from prying eyes during backup over insecure links with 168-bit 3DES encryption. ARCserve's reporting has always been a bone of contention, but the new Report Writer remedies this by allowing you to create your own customised reports.

The last Enterprise tape drives group test (see issue 114, p163) showed there's nothing between Backup Exec and ARCserve for local backup performance. But the latter's new multiplexing option looks a vote winner. Available in the NetWare version for many years, this allows up to four targets to be backed up in parallel to the same tape drive and our tests showed it can make a big difference. To test multiplexing we used a dual Xeon 1.7GHz server running Windows Server 2003 and equipped with a local HP StorageWorks 460e Ultrium-2 tape drive. Four Pentium III systems were used as network clients, each with the same 3.4GB target directory of test data. With the relevant agents installed we ran a standard sequential backup using Backup Exec and ARCserve, which took 1,069 seconds and 721 seconds respectively. ARCserve was noticeably faster for this type of task but with multiplexing selected it completed the same job in only 473 seconds - more than 50 per cent faster. Next we added four Ultra160 hard disks to the backup server each, with one volume containing 8.3GB of test data. Once again, we found ARCserve was 12 per cent faster than Backup Exec for a standard sequential backup of all four volumes to the Ultrium drive, but multiplexing improved this to 40 per cent.

ARCserve Backup for Windows is a product that just keeps getting better. Its features and overall performance make it an ideal choice for securing small- to medium-sized networks.