Software giant CA Technologies dumps arcserve biz CA Technologies has sold its arcserve data protection business to Marlin Equity Partners for an undisclosed sum. This is meant to enable CA to focus on its core technologies and get back to growth with software-as-a-service products. The arcserve product is possibly being discontinued because it will cost too much to develop …
"I remember those days, it was fine until it decided to eat its own database and I would wonder why no backup tapes were ejected (My fault for relying on the inbuilt database)."
I remember Arcserve as well. Was in 1999, on NT 4, and my first backup software (that is after Unix tar :-).
I've never heard of it after this, despite spending a long time in DC and storage ... I wonder what it became after this ...
Especially since that day you decided to clobber the root directory of the system partition in an NT4 machine with lots and lots and lots of temporary files. That day I learned a lot about how many entries NTFS can have on the root directory and how NT4 refuses to boot when there are no more freely available slots.
I worked for CA when they acquired Arcserve. At the time, they had the best 'Enterprise Backup' operational software, especially if you had NetWare fileshares. We had a fat-laptop with a SCSI tape that we used to demonstrate function at user sites. That is NOT to say that it worked perfectly.
I still am not pleased with the bullet-proof measures in common Enterprise Backup systems. We rarely get 100% correct backup on any given night. We have tried 5 vendors in 12 years. I think that most datacenters underallocate staff to maintain the various mechanisms of Enterprise Backup.
ArcServe is another product ruined by CA. Sure, when they took it over to begin with it all looked good and of course one thing CA does well is management tools.. but as usually they did a fatal combination of both mucking around with some parts of the product and completely ignoring other parts until they drove pretty much the entire customer base to the competition.
Nice.
I don't think that Arcserve surged its marketshare after purchase. It was retracked as a security-oriented suite of data protection products. The visionaries from Cheyenne departed a year before the CA acquisition. As I recall, the network bandwidth was a severe constriction for Arcserve with the then-largest setups. CA was investigating hardware solutions (Fibrechannel, etc.) to help make the backup/recovery aspect more viable.
"This is meant to enable CA to focus on its core technologies and get back to growth with software-as-a-service products."
Translation, they have drained everything they could money wise out of the product and there is nothing left to get. That seems to be the CA way, buy a product, live on the support contracts all while making hardly any changes to the product and when most of the customers leave, sell it or kill it and find another product to do the same too. CA is like a very thirsty vampire; sucking the life out of its victim.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
