CA BrightStor rolls out first backup product
An extension of CA's "3X6 strategy", the BrightStor portfolio is one of four brands identified by CA to embody the company's focus on six technology areas. The strategy, announced January this year, was formulated to streamline and focus CA product developments.
Along with Jasmine, eTrust and Unicenter, the BrightStor brand will be the primary "external communication vehicle" for CA products. While BrightStor fronts the storage solutions, Jasmine, eTrust and Unicenter showcase the stores of portal and knowledge management, security, and infrastructure management respectively.
"BrightStor is the brand name for all of CA's storage products across all platforms," said Sanjay Kumar, CEO of CA. "The products will be end-to-end, across platforms, from PC to mainframe, supporting very broad data availability requirement and the optimization of storage resources across all platforms."
The new brand came off to a running start, so to speak, as CA followed the announcement immediately with the release of the brand's first storage product, a backup and recovery solution called the Enterprise Backup Solution.
Built on a domain-based architecture, the new solution boasts a centralized management console that allows administrators to manage enterprise-wide resources and maintain security from a single location.
Running on a Sun Microsystem Enterprise 10 000 server with 33 processors running the Solaris OE and a HP Superdome 9000 Computer Server with 8 processors running HP-UX 11i, the solution clocked a sustained backup throughput of greater than 1.5 TB per hour.
That, according to CA is a new benchmark, setting new industry standard for downsizing the backup window.
"With e-business related storage requirements doubling annually, organizations are faced with three main challenges: building storage environments that can scale to meet demand, effectively managing these increasingly complex environments, and coping with ever-shrinking backup windows," said Bill North, research director for storage software at IDC. "BrightStor's performance benchmarks, combined with CA's proven track record…, make it an extremely attractive solution for organizations that need to successfully meet all three of these challenges."
BrightStor's range of products is not limited to backup and recovery solutions. The new brand promises to deliver, in the near future, software solutions for:
- Data management: enterprise-wide data availability through backup/recovery, hierarchical storage management and archiving.
- Enterprise storage resource management: administration of storage assets and data through SAN and device management, media management and application control.
- Storage infrastructure: extend core storage software through data replication and virtualization.
- Centralized enterprise storage management: integration, automation and control of global storage resources through advance portal technologies.
The BrightStor event was spiced up further by announcements of integration and technological partnerships with EMC, Brocade, Network Appliance and Emulex.