At VMworld 2012, The Cube host Dave Vellante had a chance to talk with Guy Churchward, EMC SVP of BRS Engineering, and Stephen Manley, EMC CTO of Backup Recovery Systems. They discussed some of the innovations from EMC in the realm of virtualized backup and recovery technology.

VMware and EMC have partnered to jointly develop vSphere Data Protection (VDP), powered by EMC’s Avamar product. VDP allows users to move backups into the hypervisor more efficiently and effectly, Churchward explained. The project was so critical, he said, that the company had 50 engineers working on it.

According to Manley, one of the problems with virtual machine (VM) backups is that they are not fast enough, which means recovery is not fast enough. EMC’s goal was to develop a system for more efficient backups that scale better with VM technology.

With VDP, the backup admin can work within the virtualized environment, and the protection environment is application and hypervisor aware. It is able to leverage all of the technologies underneath it, while still hitting optimum performance levels. It leverages the intelligence inside the application, they explained, in order to allow the hypervisor or storage array to recover quickly.

You can watch the full interview right here.