What’s New in Data Protection from EMC World 2015 – and Why It Matters

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Today, at EMC World 2015, EMC announced a significant number of new offerings and updates; starting from their core technologies (storage) and then quite literally wrapping it with a layer of “Data Protection Everywhere.”

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With that in mind, here are the Data Protection announcements (click here for EMC press release), with the first being that the Data Domain family of deduplicated “Protection Storage” platforms continues to get both bigger/faster and smaller.

New Data Domain DD9500 – the highest end of the Data Domain family just got bigger/faster by replacing the DD990 with the DD9500, boasting 1.7PB of usable capacity and 58.7TB/hour of ingest (backup) speeds. With primary production storage growing around 40% YoY and secondary storage often matching that, while often having to store 4X in secondary footprint compared to the primary data, organizations have to continue to push not only maximum capacity but also increase backup (and restore) speed to keep up with the criticality of protecting data.
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Software-only Data Domain “Project Falcon” – YES! Finally! A virtualized Data Domain appliance is coming, as a VM that should hopefully be deliverable on either VMware or Hyper-V hosts, with a beta planned later in 2015. I am really excited about a virtualized DD for branch-office scenarios, for small businesses, for cloud-providers who could deploy VMs to their subscribers or offer dedicated vDDs per subscriber for complete data isolation. There are lots of options that open up with virtualized deduplication appliances, and we’ll see how they unfold as the offering becomes more real later in 2015.

Both of these announcements align with ESG’s Data Protection Appliances research, check out:

In both analyses, ESG found that a majority of environments are using deduplicated storage solutions, with those that use them increasing that usage over the next two years. With business units driving IT to find ways to increase the agility of protection while reducing costs, deduplicated protection storage continues to make sense – and innovations by EMC are part of that continued momentum. Of course, EMC’s data protection story is much bigger than just its deduplication storage, and other aspects of the EMC “data protection everywhere” story also made announcements this week, particularly related to enhancing EMC’s offerings for data protection solutions for the cloud:

Spanning Cloud adds Office 365 protection to its existing support of Salesforce and GoogleApps. Far too many business execs and IT professionals are mistaken in their assumption that SaaS platforms provide backups and data retention similar to data center mechanisms; they are wrong! SaaS platforms are focused on adding functional value, cost-efficiencies, assured security, and availability – NOT backup. But to ensure that EMC customers, and prospects, are able to protect their data on-prem and in the cloud, EMC acquired Spanning in 2014, giving it a significant advantage as customers move to SaaS.
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Enhanced cloud-abilities for Networker & Avamar by delivering its Maginatics technology in a new offering called “CloudBoost.” Delivered as an intermediary virtual machine, the Cloud Boost functionality allows EMC’s backup software to utilize public clouds as secondary storage.

These innovations around better usage of cloud services as part of one’s data protection strategy also aligns with ESG research:

  • Check out my blog post on the Hunger Games of SaaS Backup
  • According to ESG’s 2015 IT Spending Intentions, Backups/Archives and BC/DR are two of the top three usage scenarios for IaaS, while SaaS adoption continues to gain momentum around file services, collaboration, and CRM. Without SaaS-backup capabilities, those migrations will reduce organizations’ data protection options.
  • According to ESG’s DPA research, 88% of those respondents believe cloud-extensibility to be at least “Important” (or Very Important or Critical) as part of their data protection strategy moving forward.

Last but not least, EMC also continues to innovate on its “backup-less backups“:

ProtectPoint support for VMAX3 enabling up to 20X data protection speeds directly from primary production storage to secondary Data Domain protection storage without going through a backup application like Networker, Avamar, or any other backup app. Instead, the data goes direct, while still being managed through the EMC data protection framework.

Check out my previous blogs on EMC ProtectPoint:

I may add more color on these announcements as the products come to market, but what I believe to be most notable is the breadth of data protection innovations (including acquisitions) that should not only benefit EMC customers and prospects, but also drive forward-looking conversations to the data protection market overall as awareness and consideration of these new capacities and capabilities creates new conversations for IT decision makers everywhere.

[Originally blogged via ESG’s Technical Optimist.com]

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