Faster De-Dupe

At EMC World 2012, EMC Corp. announced new Data Domain and Avamar deduplication systems and software that transform the backup and recovery landscape.

The new products are performance, scalable, purpose-built backup appliances that integrate with each other, with backup software and with enterprise applications.  

For years, the most common and daunting challenges backup administrators faced were backup window times and dealing with slow and unreliable tape-based recoveries. Data deduplication technology enabled performance purpose-built backup appliances to address these issues. Today, cloud and big data are transforming IT environments, but legacy backup systems can stall or cripple these valuable IT transformation projects. By delivering a next generation backup and recovery platform that builds in levels of performance, integration and management, EMC frees customers from the complexities of protecting IT environments that are changing and expanding. This gives customers flexibility and choice in how they attack their most pressing data protection challenges.

EMC establishes a new industry performance benchmark for the fastest single controller deduplication storage system with the introduction of the new Data Domain DD990.

Similarly, Avamar 6.1 deduplication software and system delivers the fastest backup and recovery performance for VMware environments, eclipsing the performance levels of its nearest competitor by 3x on backups and a staggering 30x on recoveries.

Avamar 6.1 also simplifies backup management for business critical applications with new support for SAP, Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and enhanced support for Oracle.

In addition, Avamar 6.1 increases its support for virtual environments with expanded Microsoft Hyper-V features.  

Finally, new Data Domain software brings capabilities to the Data Domain family, broadening archiving capabilities for extended retention and regulatory compliance, expanding the Data Domain Boost ecosystem and enhancing the Data Domain Data Invulnerability Architecture.

Mike Chrystal, senior technical specialist, Storage and Servers, St Charles Health System, Inc., said: "Saint Charles Health System is a multi-site facility with over 400 virtual machines. Prior to these newly announced EMC products, our backups were already ten times faster with our new integrated Avamar and Data Domain system than with our previous system, saving us precious operational time and overcoming the challenges we faced in protecting our VMware environment. Now EMC is raising our new system’s performance, adding useful new features like deeper support for Linux, and getting SQL Server 2012 support out there even before people have implemented it. EMC is covering a lot more bases than other backup vendors and constantly delivering new capabilities. For us, these newly-announced products underscore that, after our extensive evaluation process, we made the right decision by choosing the EMC backup and recovery platform."

Jason Buffington, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "EMC’s appliance-based backup and recovery platforms are expanding rapidly and bringing new levels of functionality, integration and choice to its customers. IT transformation initiatives are driving new requirements for backup and recovery, and users need to be able to architect and optimize their data protection infrastructure to meet their specific needs. EMC is delivering a capability-rich solution portfolio that meets these needs head on, while simplifying backup and recovery processes."

William ‘BJ’ Jenkins, president, EMC Backup Recovery Systems Division, said: "EMC is delivering high performance scalable appliances that integrate with each other, with backup software and with enterprise applications. Customers embarking upon transformation of IT have asked us for these capabilities because it is essential that backup infrastructures align to these new IT infrastructures. Over time, traditional backup products that do not take this end-to-end view, in effect, paint users into a corner. Our mission is to give our customers the flexibility to architect their backup infrastructures strategically, leveraging the broad product choices and integration capabilities that only EMC can deliver, and then enable them to continually evolve their backup and recovery to help drive their IT transformation efforts."