Arcserve UDP 7200V

EXCLUSIVE
Arcserve UDP 7200V
Simple to deploy, with
a large backup capacity –
a top choice for protecting
physical and virtual systems
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪
PRICE From £11,350 exc VAT
from arcserve.com
A
rcserve’s Unified Data
Protection (UDP) software
has impressed us before, and
now you can get it in a purpose-built
appliance. The new 7000 Series runs
Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard
with UDP preinstalled and ready to
protect all your physical systems
and virtual environments.
The 7200V model on review has
a large backup capacity, with 5.8TB
of available space; Arcserve claims
that deduplication and compression
can push effective storage as high
as 17TB. All models use an SSD for
the deduplication hash tables, and
they come with UDP Advanced, so
Exchange granular backup comes
as standard.
The “V” in the model name refers
to Arcserve’s Virtual Standby feature,
which uses recovery points to create
on-appliance VMs of protected nodes.
The 7200V supports up to three VMs,
which can be fired up automatically
if the source node fails. Another
central feature is the recovery point
server (RPS); this defines data stores
on the appliance to where data is
backed up, and provides replication
and deduplication services.
Setup was swift. First contact
is via a local monitor, mouse and
keyboard, and we simply followed
the quick-start wizard. Within 15
minutes we’d added the appliance
to our domain, enabled AES-256
encryption for the data store and
created our first protection plan.
Systems to protect were declared
using Active Directory discovery,
after which the appliance pushed
the UDP agent to them. The agent,
which took around ten minutes to
install, provides backup and
bare-metal recovery
services. It also
loaded the extra
plugins for our
Exchange 2013
and SQL Server
2014 systems.
These systems were then
assigned a backup plan, which
defined a schedule and a number of
recovery points to save. Our plan ran
98
an initial full backup, followed by
regular incrementals. We chose to
run these daily, but you can make
them as frequent as every 15 minutes.
Once the backup was started, the
Arcserve’s powerful hardware made
its presence felt: the 260GB on our
domain controller was secured at
an average of 79MB/sec. Subsequent
incrementals took less than five
minutes, and deduplication and
compression managed to squeeze
our dataset down to only 65GB of
on-server storage.
For our Hyper-V VMs, we created
a separate plan using the agentless
option, browsed the Hyper-V host
and imported selected VMs. This
only took a minute; we then applied a
schedule to back them up every hour.
When it comes to recovery, the
options are extensive. To access them,
we loaded the node’s agent interface
from the UDP console; then, using its
wizard, we browsed recovery points,
selected drives and folders and
decided where to restore them to.
SQL databases can be restored using
the same method, and we had no
problems with Exchange granular
Recovery. From the agent’s wizard,
we simply had to select the Exchange
restore option and choose our data
store. From there, we could view
all users and mailboxes and
restore individual emails.
The ability to make data stores
accessible as network shares is a
particularly useful feature. Once
a user logs in, they can browse
recovery points from Windows
Explorer and restore data themselves
using drag-and-drop.
For the Virtual Standby function,
the appliance runs the Hyper-V role.
After adding our Windows
“The powerful hardware SQL Server node, we could
see from the Hyper-V
made its presence felt:
Manager that a new VM
the 260GB on our domain
had been automatically
controller was secured at created; when we
an average of 79MB/sec” powered down the source
node, UDP fired up the
standby VM as soon as the 30-second
heartbeat we had set timed out.
The UDP 7200V has a high upfront
cost, but it’s extremely easy to use,
delivers a generous backup capacity
for the price and offers an excellent
range of data-protection features.
ABOVE The UDP
software provides
a well-designed
central console, and
the appliance delivers
fast backup
LEFT The setup
process is swift:
it took only 21 minutes
to add the appliance
to our domain
SPECIFICATIONS
Supermicro 1U rack server l 2.4GHz Intel
Xeon E5-2620 v3 l 32GB DDR4 RAM l LSI SAS
9271-8i PCI-E RAID l 4 x 2TB Seagate SAS
hard disks in RAID5 array l 120GB Micron
SSD l SAS iPass card for optional tape drive l
2 x Gigabit Ethernet l 3yr hardware warranty