EMC has unveiled new hardware and software products that it says enable organisations to deploy new protection storage architectures that address data protection challenges.
The storage company says the new products cut across its Data Domain, Avamar, NetWorker and Mozy product lines, and that the key tenets of the products are protection storage, data source integration and data management services.
According to EMC, backup administrators face 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 of and visibility into the protection of the environments they manage and have implemented their own solutions, it says, adding that 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.
In an interview with ITWeb, Kelly Brown, EMC's EMEA director of product marketing for the Backup Recovery Systems Division, said, based on a recent study of the South African market, EMC found a general lack of confidence in the ability to fully recover after a disruption.
"We found that the main contributors to systems downtime and data loss in South Africa are more 'mundane' issues - loss of power being the top contributor, followed by hardware and software failure," she said.
Brown explained that the EMC "Backup to the Future" product rollout aims to drive home the message that the future is now for backup transformation.
"Many organisations rely on ageing backup infrastructures that haven't been updated in many years," she noted. "There is clearly a mismatch if you think about the fact that IT systems and data are mission-critical to most companies, but they are protected by infrastructure that was built for a different era. The result is a lack of confidence in the ability to recover and/or to meet SLAs required by the business."
Brown says the new solutions are appropriate for the entire market, including channel partners. "From a protection storage standpoint, we refreshed the mid-range of our EMC Data Domain appliances with four times the performance and 10 times the scalability compared with our previous generations. But what didn't change is our list pricing, meaning customers will get even more value for their investments - approximately 38% lower dollar per GB compared with the previous generation."
From a protection software perspective, she added, EMC made improvements with Avamar 7 and EMC NetWorker 8.1, which continue integration to push the backup process closer to the applications.
"In this announcement, for example, we have closer integration with VMware, Oracle RMAN, among other enterprise applications. We are enabling a level of 'self-service recovery' for application and virtualisation teams who can perform their own backup recovery from their native application tools. All the while, the backup team still has visibility into the backups and can offer more value-added services like replication for disaster recovery and charge-back and reporting."
Finally, she said, EMC continues to integrate its backup applications (Avamar and NetWorker) with Data Domain, giving organisations and partners a single solution for backup and disaster recovery.
Robert Amatruda, research director for data protection and recovery at IDC, says organisations must have an effective data protection strategy and infrastructure in place as they transform their IT and business objectives.
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