Automated Data Protection for Virtualized, Mission-Critical Apps

As a channel partner, you need ways to help your customers protect their data and also set yourself apart from the competition. That’s what you get with the updated and greatly enhanced Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Applications. With this solution your customers gain three key, game-changing advantages: performance, automation and self-service.

Here are more details on each:

Performance

Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Applications uses three direct data paths either from the application, hypervisor or Dell EMC primary storage to Dell EMC Data Domain protection storage. Direct data paths boost backup and restore performances dramatically, compared to traditional approaches that typically require intermediary servers. Take these performance gains compared to traditional backup methods, for example:

  • Application direct: Up to 50% faster backups than traditional backup methods, up to 99% bandwidth reductions[1]
  • Storage direct: Up to 20x faster backups than traditional backup methods, 10x faster data recovery[2]
  • Hypervisor direct: Up to 5x faster backups than traditional backup methods [3]

Direct data paths reduce or eliminate impacts to application servers, which could otherwise degrade performance of the applications they support. The same goes for protecting data generated from applications using hypervisors on virtual machines, which can be difficult to back up with conventional data protection tools. By broadening the scope of coverage and accelerating performance so significantly, admins can meet even the most stringent service-level objectives (SLOs) for mission-critical applications.

By eliminating intermediary servers customers can reduce the amount of infrastructure needed, which can save both capital costs and operating expenses, the latter by reducing data center space and power requirements. It also saves IT staff the time needed for associated management and maintenance chores.

Automation

Most organizations face an explosion not only in data volumes but also in different data sources and types. This adds complexity and scalability challenges, and manual processes can’t keep up. That’s compounded by the many work groups, departments and entire lines of business (LOBs) spinning up applications on their own, with latencies of days or weeks before IT can provide data protection coverage.

To address this, Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Applications can automate asset discovery, then provision and assign protection levels to those assets. This can save IT staff time, while also providing much more visibility, agility and scale to keep pace with growing and ever-changing needs. It greatly simplifies and streamlines the entire process, enabling more cooperation between various data administrators who sit in different parts of an organization. Plus, it helps IT staff apply common data protection standards and governance across the organization that can be difficult to achieve with competitors’ conventional means.

Self-Service

LOBs in many organizations have taken to deploying their own applications, virtual machines and databases, leading to what we might call “PYOD” — protect your own data.

So, rather than fight that trend or, worse, leave the LOBs without the guidance, governance and tools to protect their data, the Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Applications platform enables IT to use the trend to everyone’s benefit. How? By empowering application owners to control their own backups using their native GUI tools, while staying compliant with IT data protection policies.

These self-service capabilities complement the automation features of Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Applications, which provides much more data protection standardization and better governance and visibility.

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The enhanced Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Applications software provides you with many ways to deliver innovative, highly differentiated data protection solutions to your customers. These can open doors to new opportunities for high-margin sales and setting yourself apart in the market. You can also cross-sell to existing Dell EMC Data Domain users or existing customers who don’t yet have modern data protection by offering them a tightly integrated solution of Dell EMC Data Domain hardware and Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Applications software. After all, they are “better together” for superior deduplication and performance.

To learn more, please visit the Dell Data Protection Suite Family web page.

[1] Based on Dell EMC internal analysis, April 2017

[2] Based on Dell EMC internal testing and compared to traditional backup, July 2016

[3] Based on Dell EMC internal testing and  compared to traditional backup, September 2016

About the Author: Hasan Usmani

Hasan Usmani is Director of Product Marketing in Dell EMC’s Data Protection Division. He has driven messaging and portfolio overhaul, new product launches, and thought leadership initiatives. Hasan brings extensive technology experience in marketing, strategy, and product management roles. He joined VCE in its first year and developed all market, customer, and competitive strategy programs that enabled VCE (later Dell EMC CPSD) to emerge as the undisputed Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure leader, and one of the fastest to $1 Billion in revenues. Hasan has been an entrepreneur, co-founding a SaaS company focused on business applications. He previously worked at HP and UB Networks.