ORLANDO, Fla.—Storage giant EMC announced that the latest version of EMC Avamar would support VMWare virtual machines, extending deduplication to a major virtual storage line and making good on two of its most significant acquisitions of the last three years.
EMC Avamar v3.7 will support VCB (VMWares Consolidated Backup) as well as EMC Celerra NAS (network-attached storage) systems, EMC announced on May 21 at its annual users and partners conference here.
The Avamar deduplication “secret sauce” is being used far and wide across the broad EMC product portfolio—in the arrays, disk libraries, content management, and all the companys storage management software. But support for VMWares VCB is a first for the major virtualization machine vendors.
EMC claims the pairing of Avamar v3.7 and VMWares VCB could reduce the time it takes to backup virtual machines by up to 90 percent by eliminating the unnecessary transmission of redundant backup data that is sent over the network and saved to secondary storage.
EMC acquired VMWare in 2004 and Avamar, a small company based in Irvine, Calif., last fall for $165 million, initiating a trend among storage vendors and making deduplication a pillar of next-generation storage systems. Now, all major storage companies either have a form of deduplication (or single-instance storage, as some call it) in their portfolios or will have it soon.
The conglomerate, based in Hopkinton, Mass., which has acquired 32 companies in the last five years including RSA in 2006 as well as Avamar and VMWare, said it is succeeding in funneling all its new technologies back into its product line, and that results are beginning to show up in the numbers.
EMC also announced a number of new products and services and unveiled a major new plan to digitize historical documents in order to rescue them from the ravages of time and nature.
Worlds largest VTL?
The company also introduced what it believes to be the “worlds largest open systems virtual tape library,” the EMC Disk Library 6000 Series. The $1 million VTL is a storage system that scales to 1.8 petabytes of usable compressed capacity and can back up a whopping 11PB of data per hour. It is based on EMC standard high-end storage array, the Symmetrix DMX-3 platform.
This is not your standard storage system. The DL6100 supports up to 1,440 disk drives in a single system and offers RAID 5 protection with a maximum usable uncompressed capacity of 615TB and up to 1.845PB of compressed capacity.
“Obviously, this is designed to be a replacement for tape systems,” EMC vice president Dave Donatelli told a press conference. “We believe that virtually all storage will be going to disk over the next few years and away from tape.”
The companys Documentum content management division unveiled a new user interface for its “next-generation” Documentum 6 enterprise content management platform. Built specifically for managing transactional-based content and business processes, Documentum 6 aims to streamline these processes by combining its process suite with EMCs Captiva document imaging software.
New Heritage Information project
President, Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci welcomed the approximately 8,000 conference participants with a keynote in which he introduced a new EMC initiative—one which will help digitize historical documents, maps, artwork and other artifacts now residing in such places as the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Anna Amalie Library in Germany.
Dubbed the EMC Information Heritage Initiative, the project will seek to scan and digitize millions of papers, photographs, drawings, video and other artifacts using EMC people, products and processes in a partnership with IDG.
Along the way, the initiative will enlist volunteers from all over the world to help in the massive effort, which aims to save history and culture from the past and make it available for generations to come.
For more information on EMC World 2007, go here.
