Storage administrators are increasingly finding themselves under pressure to provide greater access, visibility and control of resources to various stakeholders, such as application owners, virtual machine administrators and storage and server administrators. These stakeholders have, in many cases, implemented their own tools and services for administration and protection resulting in what EMC terms an "accidental architecture" that consists of a "fragmented set of data protection processes and infrastructure silos, the ownership of which is often unclear".
To tackle these issues, EMC has launched an array of new hardware and software offerings across its Data Domain, Avamar, NetWorker and Mozy lines that will address the "chaos of the accidental architecture", allowing a more structured approach that meets the demands of the business, which it calls Protection Storage Architecture (PSA).
According to EMC, the key elements of PSA are Protection Storage, Data Source Integration and Data Management Services.
Protection storage is refers to the "anchor of the architectures" which is cost and capacity-optimised storage with high data durability that can deliver disaster recovery, backup and archive.
Data source integration leverages both the optimised data flows and user interfaces of data sources including hypervisor, application and storage, to deliver the performance and visibility internal users want.
Data management services refers to a catalogue of all data copies plus reporting and analytics for compliance.
The hardware to deliver these capabilities comes in new mid-range Data Domain Systems, the DD2500, DD4200, DD4500 and DD7200 systems. EMC says that they are up to 4x faster and 10x more scalable than the existing Data Domain systems they replace and consolidate all back-up and archive data onto a single, easy-to-manage protection storage platform. The new systems support up to 540 data streams, a 3x increase that further enables complete consolidation of back-up and/or archive data. EMC says that as they are designed to lower total cost of ownership for back-up and archive storage, the new systems provide up to a 38% lower cost-per gigabyte.
The Data Domain systems now support direct back-up from SAP HANA Studio via NFS, enabling SAP HANA DBAs to leverage efficient protection storage while maintaining control of backup processes. In addition, DD Boost for Oracle RMAN now supports Oracle Exadata and SAP running on Oracle, enabling DBA control of faster, more efficient backup and disaster recovery. To support a broader range of archive storage environments, Data Domain systems now provide seamless integration with archiving applications from OpenText, IBM and Dell. With these new integrations, Data Domain systems can be deployed with over 20 products for file, email, SharePoint, content management and database archiving.
Data protection suite enhancements come in the form of Avamar 7 new support for major data centre workloads being directed to Data Domain systems, with the addition of file system and NAS/NDMP backups. Avamar also now boasts new VM Instant Access, which allows a VM to be booted from a Data Domain system and up-and running in under 2 minutes. A new VMware vSphere web client allows VMware administrators to manage Avamar back-up and recovery directly from a familiar interface.
NetWorker 8.1 introduces new integrated snapshot management, featuring a new wizard-based user interface, auto-discovery, and intelligent assignment of snapshot storage. Integrations with Data Domain systems are tightened, with Data Domain Boost support over Fibre Channel. According to EMC, this enables 50% faster backups and 2.5x faster restores compared to VTL-based configurations. Version 8.1 also has a refresh of its VMware support, leveraging Avamar technology services.
The cloud back-up capabilities of Mozy are extended to make it easier to scale cloud back-up while reducing cost and complexity, through new Active Directory integration which reduces the administration of user accounts and enhanced self-service. Simplified storage management introduces new storage pools, and keyless activation accelerates the process for provisioning new users, resulting in greater scalability.
"Organisations must have an effective data protection strategy and infrastructure in place as they transform their IT and business objectives," said Robert Amatruda, research director for Data Protection and Recovery, IDC. "EMC’s array of data protection solutions announced represents 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."
EMC said that all the new data protection products will be generally available in the third quarter of this year, and will also be available within VSPEXTM Proven Infrastructures in the same timeframe.
www.emc.com/domains/datadomain/
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