Arcserve LLC has acquired Zetta Inc. and added the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based vendor’s direct-to-cloud backup-as-a-service and disaster recovery-as-a-service solutions to its flagship Unified Data Protection suite.
Minneapolis-based Arcserve describes the move as the first step in a roughly 12-month effort that will culminate in the release of a fully-integrated comprehensive “disaster avoidance” solution for mid-market companies with both hybrid cloud and cloud-only deployment options.
Terms of the deal, which closed on June 14th, were not disclosed.
Arcserve, which has renamed Zetta’s platform Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct, plans to make that offering available to its North American channel on August 14th. Partners in Europe, the middle east, and Africa will gain access to the system in the fall, with availability in Japan following in the spring of 2018.
UDP Cloud Direct will initially have its own administration portal. A unified web-based management console offering single-pane-of-glass control over all UDP components will reach market within “a handful of months,” according to Arcserve CMO Rick Parker.
Zetta has about 40 employees and roughly 2,700 customers. It sells both directly to end users and through a network of MSPs. Those partners will now be transitioned into Arcserve’s channel, which has some 7,500 members worldwide.
Significantly, Zetta hosts its cloud in its own data centers, which it has customized for backup and disaster recovery purposes.
“When it comes to disaster recovery, if you really want to lower that price point we feel like you need your own optimized data center,” Parker says.
Unlike Arcserve’s existing UDP systems, which combine onsite and offsite recovery point servers in a hybrid cloud model, direct-to-cloud solutions like Zetta’s require no on-premises hardware, making them an attractive option for branch offices, retail outlets, and other mostly smaller sites whose owners want to keep data safe but don’t want to take on the cost and complexity of maintaining remote infrastructure.
According to Parker, Zetta’s WAN optimization technology, which can transfer large amounts of data into the cloud fast enough to keep data loss down to a few seconds when recovering applications, sets its solutions apart from other cloud-only offerings.
“They might be able to spin that application back up pretty quickly,” he says of competitors, “but they have lost hours of data.”
Zetta’s near zero recovery point objective capabilities play a critical role in Arcserve’s long-term plans to turn UDP into a disaster avoidance solution. According to Parker, weaving Zetta’s products together with its existing UDP replication and high availability platforms will ultimately enable businesses to negate disasters rather than reevocer from them.
“If you can recover from a disaster in seconds, you’ve avoided it, or at least you avoided the ensuing IT and financial disaster that can happen,” he says.
Arcserve expects integrating its legacy and newly-acquired systems to take approximately 12 months. The solution that results at the end of that process, Arcserve claims, will offer not only near zero data loss but easy implementation and comprehensive protection for physical, virtual, and cloud-based workloads as well at affordable prices.
“[It] will make availability available to a whole new swath of mid-market applications and companies,” Parker says.
Zetta’s products offer self-serve management. Arcserve considers that an essential attribute of any viable mid-market BDR solution, because systems managed externally by MSPs or others cost more than many midsize businesses will pay. With their subscription-based pricing, UDP Cloud Direct and the disaster avoidance solution Arcserve is developing now will benefit channel partners anyway, the company says, by enabling providers of managed network services to become data protection service providers as well without first building their own hosting infrastructure.
“This gives them a way to broker cloud and participate in ongoing annuities without having to be on their own data center,” Parker says, noting that Arcserve partners who wish to can private-label the company’s solutions.
Zetta is only the most recent Arcserve vendor acquisition. In April, the company bought FastArchiver and added that company’s email archiving solution to the UDP portfolio. According to Parker, more acquisitions are likely to come for Arcserve, which has been owned by Hermosa Beach, Calif.-based private investment firm Marlin Equity Partners since 2014.
“An advantage to our investment model is we’re really built to be able to add on capabilities,” he says. “I would fully expect to do more acquisitions in the future to broaden our market footprint or to deliver new capabilities to our customers.”
Arcserve has roughly 45,000 customers at present, including 26,000 UDP customers.
