When it comes to data protection, the task has arguably never been more complicated. Not only are there more data sources needing to be backed up, the rise of the public cloud means that data is also more distributed than ever.
Aiming to address that issue, EMC made a commitment today to simplifying the management of data flows across all those environments while at the same time announcing the general availability of version 4.0 of EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. That move comes on the heels of an update to the portfolio of data protection products that EMC provides specifically for VMware environments that EMC made earlier this week.
Peter Cutts, vice president of solutions for EMC, says the latest release of EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud adds the ability to support up to four distributed data centers in addition to enabling IT organizations to provide self-service capabilities across groups of virtual machines to end users via a service catalog. Via that catalog, end users can also control when a backup is scheduled to occur.
As part of this upgrade, EMC is making it simpler to encrypt data on virtual machines. It’s also making available an appliance based on a system from the VCE unit of EMC that runs an implementation of the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment created by the Cloud Foundry consortium. Cutts says the goal for that EMC Native Hybrid Cloud platform is to make it simpler for developers to automatically back data up to public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware vCloud Air running instances of the Cloud Foundry PaaS.
“In the future we’ll definitely be adding support for other public clouds,” says Cutts.
The most intriguing promise EMC is making today is the development of templates that can easily be adjusted to accommodate rapidly changing circumstances in the enterprise. New applications now go live without much intervention from the internal IT operations team. EMC is essentially promising to deliver a more agile approach to implementing data protection policies that simultaneously reduces the total cost of operations.
It may take a little while longer for EMC to deliver on that particular promise. But that commitment portends a data protection future that is going to be whole lot more automated than what most IT organizations contend with today.
