EMC Upgrades Data Protection And Data Domain Systems

EMC’s Backup and Recovery Services division has upgraded a number of products aimed at converting “accidental architectures” into storage and data protection setups.

This, it believes, will allow companies to consolidate their data infrastructure in a Protection Storage Architecture.

Accidental Architectures

“Deployment of a Protection Storage Architecture, which arrests the proliferation of the ‘accidental architectures’ we talk so much about, is the best strategy for ensuring effective data protection,” Guy Churchward, president of the EMC Backup Recovery Systems division, said in a statement. “Accidental architectures are an outgrowth of users addressing individual data protection challenges reactively as they arise, and applying costly siloed or ‘one size fits all’ products and solutions that become difficult to manage, optimise and pay for.”

Backup as a service and a Protection Storage Architecture will allow enterprises to avoid a bring-your-own-backup (BYOB) situation, Churchward said at EMC’s product launch event here on 8 July.

The goal for IT is to reduce a “stove-pipe nature and make a more flexible architecture,” as opposed to this accidental architecture, where we now have organisations that have 10 or 20 different ways of backing up systems and every single one of them has to be relearned, ” he said.

The new products include four new Data Domain (DD) systems that allow companies to consolidate their backup and storage on a single protection storage platform. The DD systems are 4 times faster and 10 times more scalable than the models they replace, EMC claimed. They also support up to 540 data streams, which is a 3x increase and enables companies to consolidate backup and/or archive data, according to EMC.

The DD systems will now back up data directly from SAP Hana Studio using Network File System (NFS). This link to Hana Studio allows IT departments to protect and store data efficiently while also maintaining control of backup processes, EMC reported. It also adds integration with archiving apps from OpenText, IBM and Dell, as well as DD Boost support for Oracle Exadata and SAP running on an Oracle platform.

In addition, the DD systems will now allow EMC’s Avamar 7 deduplication backup software and system to handle major data center workloads directed to the DD products.

The DD systems will also now feature tighter integration with EMC’s NetWorker 8.1, the company’s unified backup and recovery software.

Although Stephen Manley, CTO of EMC’s Backup Recovery Systems division, said he’d like the company to integrate NetWorker and Avamar on a single platform, EMC will need to continue to support them both, according to Churchward.

“We have to take them both forward,” Churchward said.

Mozy Backup

EMC also introduced new cloud backup features for its Mozy backup platform. Mozy adds new integration with Active Directory, keyless activation and easier storage management.

A company’s backup infrastructure needs to be flexible and more consolidated, according to Manley.

“To solve a backup problem, you need to come up with a new architecture,” he said. Instead of separate applications and files, “you need to focus on adding value and the only way is if you have visibility across an entire environment,” Manley said.

EMC’s newest data-protection products provide an “effective data protection strategy,” according to Robert Amatruda, research director for data protection and recovery at IDC.

“EMC’s array of data protection solutions announced represents a coalescence of proven, existing products with new features and functionality allowing customers to free themselves from the antiquated backup products and processes to a more flexible, holistic approach,” Amatruda said in a statement.

Moving from an accidental architecture leads to a much more controlled data protection environment, said Rob Emsley, senior director of product marketing at EMC’s Backup Recovery Systems division, who blogged about the news in a 10 July post.

The new data protection products will be generally available in the third quarter of 2013, EMC reported.

Think you are a storage guru? Try our quiz!

Originally published on eWeek.