Dell Technologies Inc. has expanded its PowerProtect family of software and appliances that’s used by companies to protect, manage and recover their most critical application data.

Dell said early Wednesday that its updated portfolio gives customers greater agility by meeting their data protection needs across VMware and Kubernetes environments, as well as in public clouds and edge locations. They can also benefit from lower costs and more scalability, the company said.

Dell detailed some considerable software advancements. The Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution, which offers machine learning and analytics capabilities that help to monitor data integrity and ensure its continued quality as it’s being used for business operations, has added new forensic tools that helps customers to discover and ward off any ongoing attacks, Dell said.

Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery is notably also the first on-premises data protection software of its kind to be endorsed by Sheltered Harbor, which is nonprofit organization that was launched in 2015 to ensure public confidence in the financial sector. By endorsing Dell’s data protection software, Sheltered Harbor has validated its ability to protect financial services providers’ data from cyber threats such as insider attacks and ransomware.

Meanwhile, the Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager offering has been updated to work with applications that are based on the open-source Kubernetes container management software. It now supports the VMware Inc.’s Tanzu portfolio that’s used by VMware customers to build, run and manage Kubernetes apps inside their vSphere environments.

Dell said Data Manager has been certified by VMware to provide native vCenter Storage policy-based management for virtual machine protection. In other words, customers can use the software to protect their VMs by assigning data protection policies from within vSphere, the company explained.

In addition, Data Manager can now protect data in cloud workloads across Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure too, including popular services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and Azure Kubernetes. There’s also better protection for applications that use open-source databases such as PostgreSQL and Apache Cassandra in Kubernetes environments, Dell said.

On the hardware side, Dell is offering up a next-generation integrated data protection appliance called the PowerProtect DP series that it says provides full data protection capabilities, including backup, recovery, replication, deduplication, cloud readiness with disaster recovery and long-term data retention for public clouds.

Customers will be most interested in the performance gains. Dell claims the the PowerProtect DP Series offers up to 38% faster backup and 45% faster restore capabilities than its older appliances. Input/output operations per second are said to be 50% faster, and the appliance is more efficient too, with up to 1 petabyte of usable capacity and 30% more logical capacity, Dell said. Not least, the appliance is said to use 23% less power than Dell’s previous generation hardware, adding up to some significant cost savings.

Phil Goodwin, an analyst with International Data Corp., said the updates are impressive. “Dell is simultaneously simplifying its portfolio and expanding its capabilities to protect both existing and emerging workload requirements,” he said.

Customers might also be interested in the new consumption model Dell has introduced with its latest PowerProtect offerings. They’re being made available through the Dell Technologies On Demand program, which is a fully managed service that gives customers more freedom over how they pay for, consume and manage their Dell appliances.

Dell said the PowerProtect Data Manager and and Cyber Recovery enhancements are available now, while the new Dell EMC PowerProtect DP series appliances will go on sale in December.

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