EMC Starts Shift to Software-Defined Data Protection

Top 10 Storage and Networking Trends for 2014

Everything in IT these days is rapidly moving to be defined by software, including now backup and recovery.

EMC today launched a Data Protection Suite spanning its Avamar, NetWorker, Data Protection Advisor, Mozy and SourceOne products that not only makes them easier to acquire, but also sets the stage for managing them as an integrated set of processes.

Rob Emsley, senior director of product marketing for EMC, says that just like the rest of the enterprise, data protection is moving toward a software-defined model that promises to make it easier to manage backup and recovery, compliance and archiving.

As part of that exercise, Emsley says EMC is moving toward enabling a self-service model under which end users would be able to directly invoke EMC products and services within the policy guideline set by the internal IT organization across both structured and unstructured data sets.

Updates to the overall suite of EMC data protection products being released today include Snapshot Management for EMC Isilon, EMC VNX and NetApp storage arrays, support for VMware vCloud Director and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, full integration between EMC Avamar and EMC Data Domain backup and recovery and archiving products, enhanced security features and Linux support for Mozy public clouds.

EMC is also introducing a new EMC Data Domain Operating System that not only makes it easier to extend Data Domain functionality to third-party applications, but also deploy Data Domain as a multi-tenant cloud service.

Finally, EMC also introduced VPLEX Virtual Edition, which enables deployment of storage as a virtual appliance in VMware environments, and support for new MetroPoint technology within VPLEX and EMC RecoverPoint software that provides the ability to continuous replicate to a third data center from two other data centers.

Slowly, but surely, the management of data protection in particular, and storage in general, is evolving into something that resembles more of a unified service. How that affects the internal operations of IT organizations will vary based on the number of and types of storage technologies they need to manage. The one good thing is that as the entire process itself becomes more automated, IT people will spend a lot less time doing storage maintenance activities which, before anyone realizes it, can easily wind up consuming the better part of a working day.