Dell Technologies World: Dell EMC Innovates in Data Protection and Data Management

Blog written on April 30t, 2019 by Beth Phalen, president and GM, data protection division, Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies

I joined Jeff Clarke on stage at Dell Technologies World to announce major innovations in our data protection portfolio. As we have maintained N°1 positions in the Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Market and the Data Replication and Protection Software Market ^[1], we have been hard at work continuing to innovate without compromise. The company is powering up our portfolio with the introduction of our next-generation data management software platform and a multi-dimensional data management appliance.

The fact that ‘Digital Transformatio’n is disrupting every industry is unavoidable – and our customers all make it clear that the explosion of data has been hard to manage. Organizations are facing complexity and inefficiency, making it difficult to derive business value from their data. Businesses are consuming IT resources differently, and the need for a powerful, efficient and trusted solution to protect data assets is clear.

Protecting data’s value isn’t about locking it away; it’s about providing superior risk reduction for workloads and enabling data reuse. With those goals in mind, we’ve built a platform to help organizations not only retain and manage essential data, but also keep the digital business running.

PowerProtect X400 appliances

With the firm’s PowerProtect software platform and the multi-dimensional PowerProtect X400 appliance, we are helping mid-size and enterprise organizations transform their data protection strategy and prepare for the future of business.

PowerProtect Software is a software-defined platform that gives IT staff confidence that their data is protected and available. It offers data management capabilities across ever-changing IT environments, leveraging the latest evolution of our trusted protection storage architecture. With the flexibility to consume via software or via an integrated appliance, it provides data protection, replication and reuse, and can be simply deployed on any standard hardware.

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Introduction to PowerProtect

PowerProtect Software empowers the entire IT team – allowing data owners to perform backup and recovery operations from their native applications, while at the same time providing central oversight and governance to ensure compliance. We believe this balanced approach to self-service for admins combined with central IT governance is a key element of any team’s data management strategy.

Of course, the software platform is built with multi-cloud organizations in mind. The platform is multi-cloud optimized, enabling long-term retention via cloud tiering and soon cloud DR. It can send data directly to the cloud with no cost, allowing customers to maximize their investment and expand capacity further.

Additionally, PowerProtect Software utilizes SaaS-based management to monitor, analyze and troubleshoot distributed environments from anywhere. This software and the PowerProtect X400 appliance enable IT to meet objectives more effectively with evolving operational intelligence.

As with any purchase, we want to make sure the investment is one that prepares our customers for the future. PowerProtect Software leverages a modern, services-based architecture to ensure the ease of deployment, scaling and upgrading that all our customers desire.

Future IT demands are difficult to predict precisely – I have noted how the explosion of data has been hard for organizations to track. Consequently, we developed our new integrated data management appliance to be multi-dimensional.

PowerProtect X400 scales out with linear performance and capacity increases and delivers scale-up, grow-in-place capacity expansion. This allows the appliance to grow with the organization as its IT demands change. As additional scale-out cubes are added to bring more performance and capacity, the X400 uses load balancing enabled with ML to deliver deduplication and performance.

Further flexibility comes from the option of hybrid or – for the first time – all flash. In fact, PowerProtect X400 is an industry’s first All-Flash Integrated Purpose-Built Backup appliance. ^[2] Providing this option ensures that every organization can find the level of performance they need, preparing today’s largest organizations to meet the SLOs of tomorrow.

After using PowerProtect X400 in his environment, customer Brian Linden, director, IT, Melanson Heath, shared this perspective: “Adding complexity to our data center right now is not an option. The PowerProtect X400 appliance was easy to deploy and configure. Within minutes we protected our VMs. The tight integration with VMware and Instant Access allows our IT staff to quickly deploy production VM images for test and development. As a result, we are able to speed up the process for initiating test and development of production applications, making our data center staff more efficient.“

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Dell EMC PowerProtect Full Overview

While we’ve been developing the PowerProtect X400, we’ve also been focused on extending our Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) portfolio, including last year’s DP4400. We also announced an 8TB capacity option for the IDPA DP4400, furthering IDPA’s momentum and market acceleration. According to the latest market data from IDC, both IDPA revenue and unit shipments have grown by more than 10x from 2017 to 2018.

This announcement cements the company’s commitment to the IDPA platform and conviction that no business is too small for world-class data protection. Now, smaller customers and locations can obtain all the enterprise-level data protection features and functionality of the IDPA family, including simple deployment, easy management, high performance, widest application coverage and cloud extensibility with native cloud tier and cloud DR capabilities, in a smaller capacity appliance. And, as the customer’s needs expand, the 8-24TB model can expand to 96TB with an optional hardware kit that will be available later this year.

^[1] Based on combined revenue from the IDC 4Q18 Purpose Build Backup Appliance (PBBA) Tracker, with select Storage Software market segments from the 4Q18 Storage Software and Cloud Service Qview.
^[2] Based on Dell internal analysis, March 2019.