In-Depth

CA Revamps BrightStor Backup Product

Policy-base management tools added, integrated improved

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 05/29/2003

Version 10.5 of BrightStor Enterprise Backup now ships with CA’s BrightStor Enterprise Portal—licensed for five concurrent users—and boasts new policy-based management tools, beefed-up integration with existing CA products and enhanced interoperability with third-party backup products.

The upshot, says Ed Cooper, product marketing manager for BrightStor Enterprise Backup, is that CA’s new product allows storage administrators to exploit a single tool—BrightStor Portal—to manage backup operations in non-CA environments, such as Legato or Veritas. “There are 38 sponsored partnerships out there that allow the portal to manage and control and centralize reporting for a wide variety of storage infrastructures, as well as backup operations,” Cooper notes.

CA has also ratcheted up integration between the new version of BrightStor Enterprise Backup and many of its existing products, including BrightStor Storage Resource Manager, BrightStor ARCServe Backup (its departmental backup tool), the Unicenter management framework, and its eTrust family of security products. As a result, Cooper says, BrightStor Enterprise Backup 10.5 can schedule ARCServe Backups as well.

The new software’s tightened integration has other benefits. By virtue of its integration with CA’s eTrust security tools, BrightStor Enterprise Backup 10.5 can help companies ensure compliance with new federally-mandated regulations for data retention, such as the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act.

Storage administrators can exploit a combination of templates and wizard-driven interfaces to define rules for data retention that are automatically implemented when an engine runs those rules against enterprise data. Cooper says that these templates and wizards can also be used to automate many common backup- and restore-related tasks. “You can answer a variety of questions and then apply them to a variety of templates, which then allows you to automate processes that in the past you would have had to do by hand.”

Cooper says that some beta users of the new software have automated as much as 60 percent of their backup management tasks.

Integration between BrightStor Enterprise Backup 10.5 and BrightStor Storage Manager enables in-depth reporting, including backup auditing and backup window trending. “We’ve tied those two products together so that we can gather all of that real-time and historical data,” Cooper says. “You can do backup window trending. Say you’ve set an SLA [service level agreement] of three hours or so. It gives you a historical account of how you’re doing with that.”

Finally, the new software can be deployed using Unicenter’s software delivery capabilities.

As far as backup performance is concerned, Cooper says that some beta customers have reported performance increases of 30 percent and 50 percent. CA’s beta program encompassed 70 customers, eight of which deployed the product in advance of general availability.