EMC Upgrades Backup, Deduplication, Reporting Offerings

EMC on Nov. 18 introduced upgrades for several of its data protection products, including those that perform analysis and reporting, backup for Microsoft and VMware virtual environments, and data deduplication.

Data deduplication, which eliminates redundant data from a disk storage device in order to lower storage space requirements, has been a powerful driver for EMC sales of new Clariion and Symmetrix storage arrays during the last two years.

Ultimately, deduplication lowers data center power and cooling costs and lessens the amount of carbon dioxide produced to generate power to run the hardware.

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In fact, deduplication software has been an important sales driver for a number of storage companies during the last two years. Enterprises looking to build new storage systems or reconstitute older ones are painfully aware of increasing electrical power costs and are seeking out cost- and environmentally-aware software and hardware.

"The world of deduplication is definitely fueling a lot of growth," EMC marketing executive Rob Emsley told me. "We've had a couple of quarters of triple-digit growth. Jed [Yueh, the Avamar Technologies founder who sold the company to EMC in 2006 for $165 million and has since left the company to start a new venture] would be proud to see how his baby is doing."

eWEEK quantified that "triple-digit growth" claim to determine that EMC Avamar has indeed grown its revenue 210 percent this year over 2007, according EMC spokesperson Todd Cadley.

Here are brief descriptions of EMC's newly upgraded products:

EMC Avamar—The latest version of EMC's backup and recovery software features source-based data deduplication and provides new security enhancements, additional capacity reporting and simplified management. Pricing starts at $17,000 for 1TB of deduplicated disk backup capacity; it will be available Dec. 5.

EMC Data Protection Advisor—This is the next generation of EMC Backup Advisor, which provides proactive analysis and reporting software. New features include support for VMware and EMC Celerra unified storage systems. Pricing starts at $8,700; it will be available Dec. 23.

EMC NetWorker—This is the first enterprise backup and recovery software to support Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor. It also includes strengthened management of the VMware infrastructure and expanded support for EMC's software and storage arrays. Pricing starts at $1,150; it will be available Dec. 23.

EMC RecoverPoint—EMC's data recovery package for EMC and non-EMC storage arrays now has protection options with new CDP (continuous data protection) capabilities for advanced replication configurations, support for VMware Site Recovery Manager, Microsoft cluster integration to improve application availability, and virtual provisioning support for EMC Clariion CX4 networked storage systems. Pricing starts at $60,500 and
is based on capacity. It will be available Nov. 21.

EMC, according to Cadley, is currently providing protection for more than 1,500 petabytes of data to about 7,000 customers worldwide, using Avamar deduplication backup and recovery software, EMC Disk Library backup-to-disk systems, and Centera CAS (content-addressed storage) systems.