VMware Inc. virtual machines run in an enviable 500,000 data centers. Sometimes their profusion is also their problem; glut can make it hard for information technology  administrators to track and protect virtual machines, according to Sal De Masi (pictured, left), director of the data protection practice at Teknicor Corp.

“The largest challenge customers face — not only in the healthcare space, but in every other vertical — is the ever-growing number of virtual machines in an environment,” De Masi said. Teknicor began with a specialty in information technology services for healthcare organizations but has since branched out to different verticals.

Companies don’t spin up VMs for the heck of it, De Masi stated. “Every time there’s a virtual machine, it’s of some importance; it needs to be protected,” De Masi said.

Masi joined Tim Breeden (pictured, right), senior director of software engineering, Data Protection Division, at Dell EMC (VMware’s parent company), in a live interview with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LisaDaliMartin), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. (* Disclosure below.)

Dell EMC’s new Data Protection Suite for Applications, or DPS for Apps, may help companies reign in the VM herd, according to Breeden. The suite culminated from deep engineering collaboration with VMware. “A huge differentiator for [DPS for Apps], against traditional sort of deployments, is automaton end-to-end in the stack from your control to your data path right through to the back-end storage,” he said.

VMs where Dell EMC eyes can see

DPS for Apps’ automation can see and act on certain software components on its own, Breeden explained. “If you put our product in your environment, and you say, ‘Hey, I have a lot of stuff,’ — it’s just sort of point us in the right direction; we’ll go and find it, and we can automate protecting it,” he said.

This includes both existing and newly introduced VMS. “If a new VMware VM pops up, we can simply discover it, add it to a protected group, and your data protection is there,” Breeden stated. “It comes back to the automation. Find it everywhere; protect it everywhere.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Dell EMC have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE