Data protection specialist Arcserve has updated its Arcserve Replication and High Availability platform with full high availability support for Linux, plus protection of Windows and Linux workloads on Microsoft’s Azure public cloud.
Arcserve RHA was developed to provide organisations with true continuous application and system availability, according to the firm, and uses a journal-based replication method that operates at the level of files and folders, rather than relying on snapshot-based backups. A heartbeat monitors the server or application, with every change asynchronously duplicated to the replica.
With Arcserve RHA 18.0, the platform gains full system high availability for Linux as well as Windows, so that it provides automatic failover for systems running both platforms. This ensures workloads remain operational with minimal interruption if a vital server goes down.
This release also extends full system support for these platforms to Azure, which means that Windows systems can replicate to XenServer, VMware, Hyper-V, Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure, while Linux systems can replicate to VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure.
At the application level, organisations can now manage data replication for Exchange, SQL, IIS, SharePoint, Oracle, Hyper-V and custom applications.
This release of Arcserve RHA also offers the ability to rollback applications to a point in time before a system crash, data corruption, or ransomware event.
Also new is Hyper-V Cluster Share Volumes (CSV) support for Microsoft Hyper-V scenarios, Windows Server 2019 support, plus enhanced monitoring and alerting capabilities.
Arcserve AHA is used by customers in industries such as manufacturing, banking and finance, for whom the issue is not just about recovery but the delivery of always available systems, according to Arcserve. Manufacturing especially cannot afford to have onsite systems down due to application availability issues.
Arcserve RHA is licensed per server, per virtual machine or per host. Pricing remains the same as it was for RHA 16.5.
However, Arcserve told Blocks & Files that some licensing changes have been made in this version: it now requires minimum of two licenses (source and target) for initial purchase, per socket and per TB options are longer available, license keys for RHA 16.5 will not work with RHA 18.0, and operating a trial version will now require a license key.