EMC Kicks off a Data Protection-as-a-Service Revamp

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EMC is bringing its data protection portfolio into closer alignment with the agile data movement methodologies championed by software-defined data center advocates.

The Hopkinton, Mass.-based data storage giant this week unveiled several new enhancements that, according to Rob Emsley, senior director of Marketing for EMC’s Data Protection and Availability division, represent a major shift in how organizations manage data backup and recovery. “Data protection needs to evolve,” he told InfoStor.

Portraying data protection practices as constrained by a “central point of control within most customer environments,” Emsley said that EMC in recent years has set on a journey to “empower multiple data owners.” The company’s goal, he added, is to get IT managers “to think about data protection, rather than a task that you perform, as a service” that intelligently optimizes storage network resources, offers application users more control and seamlessly integrates into modern workflows.

In support of the EMC’s new data protection-as-a-service strategy, the company has announced several enhancements to the company’s backup and recovery product line-up, which are being rolled out during the second quarter. Among them is Data Domain Boost for Enterprise Applications.

An example of “not just delivering solutions to the backup admin,” the Data Domain feature hands application administrators control over their backups through tools that integrate with their native toolsets.

“We actually empower admins to use their application utilities,” said Emsley. Data Domain Boost for Enterprise Applications supports Oracle, SAP, SAP HANA, DB2 and SQL Server. IT needs only to “plug in our technology from Data Domain into those utilities,” and allow those responsible for business applications to wrest control over their own data, speeding some storage management tasks, particularly restores that can otherwise take hours as storage administrators juggle competing priorities, he added.

Data Domain also gains multi-tenancy support for cloud environments. Acting as a foundation for data protection as-a-service deployments, the capability provides data isolation for large enterprises and service providers, a must-have requirement for delivering secure, cloud-based storage services.

In terms of long-term data protection, Data Domain gets a big upgrade. Its archive storage tools now “include support for billions of files and legal hold for compliance,” said the company.

On the VPLEX front, the company announced Virtual Edition, a low-cost virtual appliance for midsized businesses that have standardized on VMware. New VPLEX and RecoverPoint integrations enable MetroPoint, a continuous data protection services configuration wherein even if two data center sites are taken offline, “a third site acts as a disaster recovery environment,” explained Emsley.

Showing files-based data some attention, the company announced new Snapshot Management. The feature, available on Isilon, VNX and NetApp arrays, allow administrators to supplement NAS data protection with EMC’s extensive backup capabilities, said Emsley.

EMC’s Data Protection Suite (Avamar, NetWorker, Data Protection Advisor, Mozy and SourceOne) grows more virtualization-friendly with new VMware vCloud Director and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager integrations. Avamar and Data Domain are fully integrated now, added the company. And in a bid to attract more enterprises to its Mozy cloud platform, EMC announced new Linux support and improved security.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

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