Data Protection Looms Large at Storage Decisions

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Data protection is a big theme at last week’s Storage Decisions conference in New York, with Microsoft and VMware among the vendors showing off their wares.

Microsoft on Wednesday released a public beta of the Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) version 2 at the conference.

The new version delivers continuous data protection (CDP) for Microsoft application and file servers, extending DPM’s benefits from individual file servers to mission-critical Microsoft applications like Exchange Server, SQL Server and SharePoint Portal Server with integrated disk-to-disk-to-tape protection.

“DPM version 2 combines the concepts of continuous data protection and traditional tape backup, online and offline, into a single product, enabling a zero data loss configuration for applications,” stated Kirill Tatarinov, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Windows Enterprise Management Division.

VMware Backup Makes a Splash

VMware said it has received broad support for VMware Consolidated Backup, a part of VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise edition that leverages virtualization technology to speed up backup and recovery.

CA, CommVault, EMC, IBM Tivoli, Symantec and Vizioncore have all pledged support for the product, the EMC unit said.

Karthik Rau, VMware’s senior director of infrastructure products and solutions, said virtualization “provides groundbreaking new ways to address age-old problems in the areas of system and data protection and recovery. Unlike traditional physical infrastructure, a virtual infrastructure eliminates the hardware dependencies that typically complicate backup and restore operations.”

VMware Consolidated Backup offloads backup to a centralized server, allowing VMware ESX Server, which is also part of VMware Infrastructure 3, to run more virtual machines by reducing its load, eliminating hardware dependencies and enabling backup to occur safely even during production hours.

Index Engines Adds Value to Tape

Index Engines, meanwhile, unveiled what it claims is the first solution to directly index the contents of offline tape media, making backup, recovery and legal discovery processes more efficient and intelligent.

The new TE-200 Tape Engine turns offline backup tapes into a directly searchable repository, Index Engines says. It can scale to index tape archives of all sizes, from small discovery operations of a few hundred tapes up to large corporate environments. The TE-200 indexes tapes at the maximum physical speeds of modern tape drives and can index many tape drives simultaneously.

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