EMC is focused on providing an end-to-end hardware/software data protection system, says EMC BRS Division President William “BJ” Jenkins. To do that,”  he said on The Cube from EMC World 2012 on Monday, May 21, “it is going to move toward integrating its Avamar and Data Domain backup systems over the next year.

“Complexity is a key word with IT users,” says Jenkins in the live Webcast. EMC is going to reduce complexity for its users by simplifying its portfolio and providing an end-to-end backup and recovery solution from one vendor that stands behind the entire system.

Specifically, he promises enhancements to Avamar to write to Data Domain and to support a single data management and catalog framework between the two systems. And he also promises enhancements to integrate that data management framework with third-party data management environments such as Microsoft to further simplify the environment for data and backup managers.

“When I talk with software-only backup and recovery providers,” Jenkins says, “I ask them, ‘When you’re customer has a problem, how do you know that the data they have was actually written to the hardware. How do you know there wasn’t a disk failure or data corruption?’

“Service up front is important,” he said. “But just as important, service on the back. When our customer has a problem, they make one call and we fix that problem end-to-end.”

EMC’s Data Domain purchase was probably in part a defensive move, to counter NeetApp’s offer, he admits. However, it has proven to be a major market builder for EMC.

“Today we have 1,000 tapeless backup customers,” he said, admitting that those customers may still use tape for archiving. Usually software is the sticky part of the architecture, and hardware is interchangeable. But that is reversed with Data Domain. Customers who buy it often then add other EMC products upstream.

A shift in the overall data architecture is also driving growth in the market for Data Domain. “Five years ago customers would make a backup, write it to tape, and send that off-site for backup. Today many have a service provider or secondary data center are replicate between them and the primary center. That triples the market.”

Then, he says, the growth in unstructured data is driving the growth of NAS and backup faster than anticipated.

On the other hand, the backup market is becoming more competitive, particularly with Symantec and Quantum making major moves. But overall Jenkins is confident that EMC will continue to grow its share of the purpose-built backup device market with Data Domain.