Dell increases protection capabilities with software

By Cat Yong

Data is growing exponentially and according to Forrester Research, back up data and disaster recovery are primary drivers of this upward trend in data growth. As business models transform towards providing 24/7 online services, there is urgent need for instant failover in the event of a disaster, or business continuity.

Backing up data can partly address this need, but IT environments that are increasingly complex, do not leave much of a window for doing backups and restores.

Dell’s General Manager for Data Protection in APJ, Kumar Mitra explained, “The backup scenario used to be businesses having to handle 1 to 2 terabytes (TB). Now, businesses have to deal with at least 40 TB of data. And the time window to back this up is reducing too.”

One way to address this challenge is with right-sized solutions, according to Kumar.

Admittedly, one solution does not fit all use cases and Kumar said, “Therefore, you need to classify data, typically into mission-critical data that has impact on the business, business critical data which is usually transactional data, and data for archiving.”

Dedupe and back up to the rescue
Dell’s software division claims to be able to provide the answer, in the form of a deduplication appliance, DR6000 , coupled together with the latest version of their back up software, NetVault Backup 10.

This combination is reportedly able to give customers ultra-fast backup speeds of 22TB per hour, a throughput speed that targets mid-market to enterprise segments. How it is able to do that is via a new backend database that isn’t proprietary like before, resulting in up to three times scalability, or according to Kumar, “One instance of the software can now protect up to a thousand servers.”

There is also a new Web-based interface that is accessible via any browser, enabling the management of multiple deduplication appliances from a single interface.

Kumar also added that the DR appliance family has a virtual version, which is suitable for organisations with distributed physical offices that have VMware and Hyper-V environments.

“Users only need to load a DR virtual option onto a server, and even the local backup data gets deduplicated,” Kumar said while adding that Dell’s solution provides deduplication capabilities at the core as well as at the edge, and will work with any backup solution out there, in a non-intrusive manner.

The case for end-to-end integration
Dell Software began in 2012 and consists of 5 core areas; data protection one of them. The others are to do with cloud and data centre management, mobile workforce management, security or identity access management, and information management.

Six releases in last 4 months for their backup solution, reflects Dell Software’s significant investments in its backup and recovery product line over the past two years, and APJ Managing Director, Matthew Johnston opined that Dell is the only provider that can offer the full security story.

He said, “A business would usually have to go to five different vendors to get 15 to 20 pieces of software. But with us, when you roll in mobile device management (MDM) as well, we are very complete and comprehensive.

“We are not tied in to any legacy or proprietary operating system, and we are an end-to-end solution.”

This, and Dell being able to react quickly to the market, according to Johnston, is due to Dell’s software solutions being relatively ‘new’ compared to more established players whom he also described “could not get out of legacy unless they rewrite their apps or chuck out their old business strategy!”

In a bid to increase their capabilities, Dell had gone on an acquisition spree, acquiring 21 companies since 2011, to beef up mostly the Dell Software organisation.

Johnston had admitted that businesses would usually see symptoms of lack of product cohesion, like slow access to apps and information or inability for systems to ‘interact’ across departments, and he assured that a Dell priority is to integrate all their solutions onto a single platform.