Storage industry stalwart EMC is revamping its data protection line up as part of its ongoing efforts to deliver on the vision of the software-defined data center, where IT service delivery is decoupled from the underlying infrastructure and driven by business objectives rather than physical constraints.

The company hopes to turn that into a reality for the enterprise by plugging into the public cloud and opening up its portfolio, starting off with the Data Protection Suite. The bundle brings together EMC’s core backup and recovery solutions under a flexible licensing model that allows customers to mix and match the individual products according to their specific requirements. It was originally announced six months ago at EMC World 2013, where Stephen Manley, the CTO of the vendor’s Backup Recovery Systems business, outlined his 24-month roadmap to Data Protection-as-a-Service in an exclusive interview SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE.

“You should see out of us, over the coming 24 months, in incremental releases, an entire re-imagination of data protection cataloging at a scale that no one has seen with flexibility that no one has seen,” Manley said. EMC is aiming to deliver solutions that are “not directly coupled to any specific application and should be able to span from local snapshots all the way up to cloud versions,” he added. The latest edition of the Data Protection Suite is the first in the series.

NetWorker, one of the products included in the package, now provides snapshotting capabilities for Isilon and VNX arrays as well as competing systems from NetApp. Also new is “deep support” for VMware vCloud Director and Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager that will allow admins to manage their entire environments – meaning both compute and storage – from a single interface regardless of which virtualization solution they happen to be using. The updates underscore EMC’s push to provide more customer choice, which is becoming an increasingly important differentiator as value creation moves up the stack and IT spending shifts accordingly.

Other enhancements to the Data Protection Suite include new security features and the addition of Linux support to the Mozy cloud-based recovery service, which was incorporated to the bundle last November and had previously only been available on Windows and Mac OS. Plus, EMC integrated the Avamar virtualized dedupe software with the Data Domain Operating System that powers its disk-based backup and archive systems. The newest release of the platform, which was also announced today, introduces multi-site disaster recovery for SAP’s HANA in-memory database and business applications, in addition to Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server.

Additionally, the OS has been made more scalable and updated to enable multi-tenant data protection environments that can support the type of service-oriented delivery models Manley described on theCUBE. That functionality is geared towards large enterprises and service providers looking to harmonize management, security and SLAs across their environments in order to drive operational efficiencies.

Expanding market opportunities

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“To me this announcement is all about EMC expanding its market opportunity,” stated Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante. “Astoundingly, at $3 billion+ the purpose-built backup appliance market is now larger than the tape market was at its pre-deduplication peak. EMC has two thirds of that market so EMC management has to be thinking ‘how do we follow that act?’ I think the answer is on better integrating the piece parts, going deeper into high value workloads and setting up a technology platform that can take customers into this idea of Data Protection-as-a-Service.”

Continuing the integration theme, EMC announced new releases of its VPLEX storage virtualization and RecoverPoint continuous replication solutions that can in tandem power what the company refers to as a “MetroPoint” topology. The configuration provides continuous operations across 2 data centers, remote replication to a third location, data protection for all three and the ability to sustain a failure at up to two of the sites without incurring information loss.

Last but not least, the vendor introduced a slimmed-down version of VPLEX that can be deployed as a virtual appliance at a price point that makes sense for midmarket companies. The product falls into step with the industry-wide trend to make enterprise functionality available to smaller organizations.

photo: Martin Gommel via photopin cc