HOPKINTON, Ma. – EMC is continuing to integrate its disk-based back-up and recovery solutions with new software enhancements and solutions.
“For years, companies utilized tape-based storage systems for backing-up and restoring data. EMC, on the other hand, has established leadership in developing and delivering higher performance disk-based technologies for these processes, significantly shortening the time required for back-up and recovery and vastly improving access to critical business information,” stated Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.
Individually, these new releases “are minor” but as part of a process of continued integration of data protection under EMC the entire effort is “commendable,” stated Lauren Whitehouse, an analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group.
“EMC is seeing a lot of momentum around disk-based data protection and is continuing to enhance its products to keep pace with customer requirements and remain competitive,” she observed.
One of the solutions is EMC’s Data Protection Advisor v5.0, which monitors, troubleshoots, analyzes, and facilitates planning across data protection environments. It supports EMC Celerra storage systems, Avamar de-duplication, VMware environments and third party storage systems. Its pricing starts at $8,700.
Formerly branded as Backup Advisor, Data Protection Advisor is the first release of the renamed product, following EMC’s formal acquisition of WysDM — an OEM partner that had originally developed Backup Advisor. “[This] “reflects the fact that the product is reporting on more than just backup,” stated Whitehouse.
EMC’s upgraded enterprise backup and recovery software, NetWorker V7.5 supports Microsoft Hyper-V, strengthens the management of VMware Infrastructure, and expands support for EMC software and storage arrays, including EMC RecoverPoint, EMC HomeBase and EMC Symmetric TimeFinder. EMC RecoverPoint, EMC HomeBase and EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder. The pricing starts at $1,150.
What stands out in the new version of NetWorker, maintained Whitehouse, are the following: SharePoint granular recovery, auto-discovery of VMware environments, and new client licensing per hypervisor versus per virtual machine.
Meanwhile, EMC Avamar v4.1 includes source-based data de-duplication to reduce storage/bandwidth requirements and provides new capabilities in security, capacity reporting and streamlined management. The pricing starts at $17,000 for a single terabyte of de-duplicated disk backup capacity.
“For Avamar, all of the enhancements will be useful to existing customers, but they also improve Avamar’s chances of winning new customers,” stated Whitehouse.
Finally, there is EMC RecoverPoint v3.1 which is the latest version of EMC’s solution for EMC and non-EMC storage arrays. The solution delivers new continuous data protection for advanced replication configurations; support for VMware Site Recovery Manage; Microsoft cluster integration to improve application availability; and virtual provisioning support for EMC Clarion CX4 networked storage systems. Pricing of RecoverPoint software starts at $60,500 and is based on capacity.
Charles King told eChannelLine he is particularly impressed with the new RecoverPoint.
“Due to technological limitations, CDP has typically been used within single datacenters — backing-up snapshots to arrays located just a few meters away from primary storage. With RecoverPoint 3.1, businesses can now extend CDP storage environments as much as 30 kilometers away from primary datacenters, thus significantly improving the safety of business information.”
The other noteworthy aspect of EMC’s new data protection solutions is that they provide a firmer grounding for physical and virtual environments, stated Greg Schulz, senior analyst and founder at Storage I/O.
“Virtualization software requires tools such as data protection advisor to quickly and accurately isolate and determine issues and opportunities to maintain service levels and quality of service.”
The key driver for these products is to drive down the cost and the risk of protecting data, stated Rob Emsley, EMC’s senior director of product marketing. “One of the top requirements from customers is to slow down their data growth, certainly in the world of backup.”
This column was written by Paul Weinberg of ConnectIT, an IntegratedMarCompany
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