EMC Delivers Integrated Backup Products

EMC Corporation announced the availability of new EMC NetWorker backup software integrated with EMC Data Domain Boost software.  

The integration of these products increases backup speeds and simplifies configuration and management. The NetWorker Management Console now offers control for the range of Data Domain system functionality, including Data Domain replication for scheduling and monitoring of backups at all sites. EMC also announced new productivity enhancements for NetWorker users, such as checkpoint restart, simplified cloning and new disk load balancing and space management capabilities.

IDATA specializes in the design, delivery and support of solutions to store, manage and protect data. With offices across New Zealand and Australia and customers worldwide, IDATA has specialised in EMC NetWorker services and support for over 17 years for customers across all industries and ranging in size up to the largest enterprise organizations. "Given our significant base of NetWorker users and the fact that we manage many customer environments ourselves, we were eager to participate in the NetWorker beta program," said Steve Brown, Technical Director of IDATA. "We have tested NetWorker extensively and found it to be both a very stable and trouble-free release as well as offering valuable additional functionality. We believe features like Scheduled Cloning and Check Point Restart are going to help us better support and grow our base of customers.  EMC’s additional investment in NetWorker is great news for users looking to decrease the amount of time they spend managing their backups by up to 20-30 percent, reduce costs and deploy more effective disaster recovery.  Full management of Data Domain systems from within NetWorker is a major improvement. We have a large customer deployment pending that involves multiple Data Domain DD880 systems and, based on our beta experience, we will be implementing NetWorker as we are confident that we can deliver fantastic results."

Boston Medical Center (BMC) is a private, not-for-profit, 639-licensed bed, academic medical center that serves over a quarter million patients annually. BMC uses EMC NetWorker and Data Domain systems to backup and replicate approximately sixty-five terabytes of data a week. "We were excited by several aspects of the new NetWorker release," said Henry Bardol, Senior System Server Engineer for Boston Medical Center. "The ease and speed with which the new wizard-based tools allowed us to set up a device and backup to it was impressive – it literally took only about 10 minutes. If a large backup in process was to be interrupted by a scheduled downtime we happened to be unaware of, the check point restart feature prevents us from having to go back and start the process all over from the beginning. In addition, because there is visibility into all NetWorker catalogues from one pane of glass, if our primary site was to go down, the NetWorker Management Console would be ready to immediately begin pulling data from our secondary site. Several years ago, a hundred percent of my time was spent administrating backups. This improved significantly with the addition of Data Domain. Now, with the full integration of Data Domain and NetWorker, I can see backup administration taking up just fifteen to twenty percent of my time, which opens my schedule up to take on a lot more work for BMC’s IT group."

Wentworth-Douglass is one of the largest acute care hospitals in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire and Southern Maine. The hospital uses EMC’s NetWorker, Data Domain and Avamar® products for its backups and is running over 135 VMware virtual machines. "The integration of NetWorker with Data Domain and Avamar shows that EMC is serious about management and reporting, and serious about providing a ‘single-pane-of-glass’ to manage highly-scalable virtualized environments," said Scott Heffner, Network Operations Manager for Wentworth-Douglass Hospital. "The ability to monitor all our cloning through NetWorker is a night and day scenario for us.  In the past we’d written our own custom scripts to do cloning, which is time consuming and not always straightforward.  Having the ability to just go into NetWorker and see everything at a glance is wonderful – there’s no guesswork involved. Beyond the technical advantages and time savings, the integration of these backup products leads to easier back-end support, with just one number to call."

EMC NetWorker with DD Boost Integration Benefits

• Speeds Backups: improves NetWorker aggregate throughput to a Data Domain system up to 2X by distributing parts of the deduplication process to the NetWorker storage node.
• Simplifies Replication Management: enables NetWorker Management Console to manage EMC Data Domain Replicator software for scheduling and visibility of all backups at both primary and secondary locations including support for separate retention policies.
• Simplifies Set-up and Monitoring: wizard-based discovery and configuration streamlines setup of Data Domain systems and new monitoring and reports simplify system administration.

New NetWorker Capabilities

• New Simplified Cloning: allows configuration and scheduling via the NetWorker Management Console, eliminating the need for scripting (but still retaining CLI flexibility)
• Checkpoint Restart: allows backups to be restarted from the point of interruption as opposed to restarting from the beginning.
• Backup to Disk enhancements: optimizes the use of Advanced File Type Devices, including new load balancing capabilities and space management.
• New capacity-based licensing option: allows customers to purchase NetWorker based on the amount of source data protected.

Availability
EMC NetWorker 7.6 SP1 is available through EMC and its worldwide reseller base.