EMC has announced new hardware and software products intended to deliver on the company’s promise of simplifying and speeding up the backup process, and give customers more control over their storage infrastructure.
The storage expert unveiled a new midrange tier of Data Domain storage systems, added new features to its Avamar and NetWorker backup software, and updated its Mozy cloud backup service.
“The vision is to get the attention of end-users to help them leverage the type of platform which ensures agility to help them give new levels of control,” said Dmitri Chen, EMC Vice President for Backup Recovery Systems, Asia Pacific and Japan. “I don’t want to stop them from being able to protect their environments when these are going unprotected.”
“Whether you are a server administrator, storage administrator, application administrator or virtual administrator,” continues Chen, “these end-users are demanding that they should have a backup strategy, an archive strategy, and a disaster recovery strategy.”
Chen also claims that companies are moving into IT service model, so the one that they typically looked at first would be backup-as-a-service, archiving-as-a-service, disaster-as- a-service, and storage-as-a-service. “Across our portfolio, we can help them leverage technology and introduce these new types of added service models immediately,” he said.
New Data Domain Systems
EMC has introduced four new midrange Data Domain systems (DD2500, DD4200, DD4500, and DD7200) that deliver up to 4x faster performance and 10x more scalable than the existing DD systems, providing more value for investment of up to 38% lower cost per gigabyte.
Designed to support 540 data streams, these systems consolidate all backup and archive data onto a single, easy-to-manage protection storage appliance.
To drive data backup directly to the Data Domain, there’s SAP HANA Studio via NFS which enables SAP HANA DBAs to leverage control and recovery. In addition, DD Boost for Oracle RMAN enhancements supports Oracle Exadata and SAP running on Oracle for a faster, more efficient backup and disaster recovery. DD systems also offer seamless integration with archiving applications from Open Text, IBM and Dell to support a broader range of archive storage environments.
Faster Backups
Avamar 7 now supports all major data center workloads being directed to DD systems, with the addition of file system and NAS/NDMP backups. With the setup, all major data center workloads can now be protected by the combined solution. Avamar has also been enhanced further for VMware to protect virtual architecture.
On the NetWorker front, EMC has introduced new integrated snapshot management to NetWorker 8.1 and tightened integration with Data Domain systems. EMC says Data Domain Boost support over Fibre Channel enables 50 percent faster backups and 2.5x faster restores compared with VTL-based configurations. It also enhanced its VMware support, leveraging Avamar services.
Storage Backup Service
Additions to Mozy by EMC have also been made and these include new active directory integration which makes it easier to create user accounts; simplified storage management with new storage pools; and keyless activation which accelerates the process of provisioning new users.
In a survey conducted by EMC across 400 companies with 250 employees in the APJ, Chen reveals that they have an unprecedented watch around their backup recovery systems division. The study found out that 44% of companies still rely on tape exclusively to backup their data which, according to him, poses a lot of challenges.
“Eighty five percent of respondents are companies which experienced data loss in the last 12 months while nearly 75% represents decision makers who are not confident they could fully recover,” Chen said. As a consequence, businesses suffer, causing product or service development delays as relayed by 55% of respondents, 51% reported revenue losses, while 48% claimed loss of productivity.
Chen disclosed that the study also attributed the trend to the unprecedented growth levels in the amount of data, focus on cost, and virtualization or the tremendous return on investment from the overall business standpoint.
He mentioned mobility and the BYOD (bring-your-own-device) which create new sets of challenges to the IT operations, and regulatory compliance pressures (which is the No. 1 driver for customers to get out of the tape operation business) are the reasons why IT users are asking for more control over their environments.
EMC’s Areas of Focus
For his part, EMC Philippines Country Manager Ronnie Latinazo shares that EMC is focusing on three areas namely, cloud computing, big data and trust.
“EMC was one of the first few companies who started talking about cloud, the trend on cloud, how companies are expected to move in terms of adoption – either private or public cloud, and the combination of which would be a hybrid cloud environment,” Latinazo claims.
According to him, the initiative starts with virtualization. “In the Philippines, the penetration rate of virtualization is at an early state compared with countries like Singapore and Australia. We’re talking probably about 14% to 15%, so we think we are well-poised to take advantage of this trend towards journey to the cloud.”
Regarding big data, Latinazo stressed that more and more companies are seeing an opportunity to leverage the wealth of information they had. “When we talked about big data, we’re talking about companies who are able to get actionable insight into the amount of data that they had,” he said.
He also added that if there’s cloud technology and big data, there must be trust in the area of security and protection.
Aside from these focus areas, Latinazo mentioned other IT trends that are driving growth for EMC. These include virtualization, deduplication and the birth of a solid-state drive.
Low Adoption Rate
The Philippines has still a lower adoption rate in virtualization but what is interesting, according to Latinazo, is that the growth is accelerating in the past two years. “That will drive further growth for our business being a major player in the consolidation phase.”
One of the most compelling value propositions driving the backup recovery system is the deduplication or the process of taking away redundancy in data. “Depending on the type of data companies are storing, we’re seeing deduplication rate ranging from a low of 30% to 40% to a high of 80% to 90%. Imagine the savings on storage when you’re reaching 98%,” he said. “If you need to buy 100 terabytes in the past, you only need two terabytes to store that amount of logical data.”
Another technology trend that will offer business opportunities for EMC is the move to a solid-state flash drive. “What’s driving that is the tremendous growth of information, with volume requiring greater performance, agility and availability, so if we look up at the technology behind the traditional storage device, it’s magnetic,” Latinazo disclosed. “The only way to make it faster is to make it spin faster. That’s the birth of a solid-state drive.”
