EMC ‘elevates’ Data Protection strategy

EMC Corporation has announced a broad array of new hardware and software products that enable customers to deploy new Protection Storage Architectures that address today’s and tomorrow’s data protection challenges. The new products cut across the company’s market leading Data Domain, Avamar, NetWorker and Mozy product lines.

Backup administrators are facing increasing pressure to meet the needs of a diverse set of stakeholders that includes application owners, virtual machine administrators and storage and server administrators. Many of these stakeholders wish to increase the control and visibility into the protection of the environments they manage and have implemented their own solutions. The result is an “accidental architecture” that consists of a fragmented set of data protection processes and infrastructure silos, the ownership of which is often unclear.

With today’s announcement, EMC is delivering a full range of capabilities that enable backup teams to transform from the chaos of the accidental architecture to a more effective Protection Storage Architecture that meets the demands of the business. The key tenets of EMC’s Protection Storage Architecture are:
· Protection Storage: The anchor of the architectures is cost- and capacity-optimized storage with high data durability that can deliver disaster recovery, backup and archive.
· Data Source Integration: Leverages both the optimized data flows and user interfaces of data sources including hypervisor, application and storage, to deliver the performance and visibility internal customers want.
· Data Management Services: A catalog of all data copies plus reporting and analytics for compliance.

Technology Highlights
· New Midrange Data Domain Systems: The new Data Domain DD2500, DD4200, DD4500 and DD7200 systems deliver the performance and scalability to cost-effectively consolidate all backup and archive data onto a single, easy-to-manage protection storage platform. These new midrange systems are up to 4x faster and 10x more scalable than the existing Data Domain systems they replace. In addition, the new systems support up to 540 data streams, a 3x increase that further enables complete consolidation of backup and/or archive data. Designed to lower total cost of ownership for backup and archive storage, the new systems provide up to a 38% lower cost-per gigabyte.
· Extended Backup and Archive Application Support: Empowering application owners is critical to delivering a Protection Storage Architecture. Data Domain systems now support direct backup from SAP HANA Studio via NFS – enabling SAP HANA DBAs to leverage efficient protection storage while maintaining control of backup processes. In addition, DD BoostTM for Oracle RMAN now supports Oracle Exadata and SAP running on Oracle – enabling DBA control of faster, more efficient backup and disaster recovery. To support a broader range of archive storage environments, Data Domain systems now offer seamless integration with archiving applications from OpenText, IBM and Dell. With these new integrations, Data Domain systems can be deployed with over 20 products for file, email, SharePoint, content management and database archiving.
· Data Protection Suite Enhancements: EMC Avamar® 7 now supports all major data center workloads being directed to Data Domain systems, with the addition of file system and NAS/NDMP backups. With this addition, all major data center workloads can now be protected by the combined solution. Avamar extends its leadership for virtual environments with new VM Instant Access, which allows a VM to be booted from a Data Domain system and up-and running in under 2 minutes. Also, a new VMware vSphere web client allows VMware administrators to manage Avamar backup and recovery directly from a familiar interface.
EMC NetWorker® 8.1 introduces new integrated snapshot management, featuring a new wizard-based user interface, auto-discovery, and intelligent assignment of snapshot storage. Integrations with Data Domain systems are tightened, with Data Domain Boost support over Fibre Channel. This enables 50% faster backups and 2.5x faster restores compared to VTL-based configurations. Finally, NetWorker is delivering a complete refresh of its VMware support, leveraging Avamar technology services.
· New Cloud Backup Functionality: Mozy by EMC makes it easier to scale cloud backup while reducing cost and complexity. New Active Directory integration reduces the administrative burden of separately creating user accounts and enhances self-service, which greatly reduces the TCO. Simplified storage management introduces new storage pools which means less time spent monitoring storage quotas at the individual machine level. Finally, keyless activation accelerates the process for provisioning new users, resulting in greater scalability.