Dell EMC has announced new and enhanced capabilities to the Dell EMC Data Domain and Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) portfolio of backup storage appliances designed to offer organisations real-world flexibility and value with expanded multi-cloud capabilities and improved performance. The enhancements also provide mid-sized organisations and remote offices of larger organisations with more choice and options in obtaining enterprise-level data protection.

According to IDC, 92% of organisations have adopted a cloud environment with 64% adopting a multi-cloud approach. With a mix of different clouds, protecting data across workloads while meeting compliance and security requirements is a critical challenge for many organisations. In fact, according to a study conducted by IDC for Dell EMC, cross-cloud support was the highest recognised data protection deficiency for IT transformation. Dell EMC recognises this challenge and continues to enhance its data protection appliances to help customers mitigate risk and protect their most valuable asset – their data – in multi-cloud environments.

Multi-cloud capabilities

Data Domain OS 6.2 and IDPA 2.3 software now provide customers with even more choice to extend their data protection to public clouds with expanded Cloud Tier support to Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba Cloud, thereby, enabling more flexibility for long-term retention. This is in addition to support already offered across AWS, Microsoft Azure, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, Virtustream, Ceph, IBM Cloud Open Storage, AWS Infrequent Access, Azure Cool Blob storage and Azure Government Cloud. Also, a new Free-space Estimator Tool for Cloud Tier helps enable more efficient capacity management to help reduce on-premises and cloud storage costs.

Dell EMC also expanded its ecosystem of supported public cloud providers for Data Domain Virtual Edition (DD VE), which provides software defined data protection on-premises and in public clouds, to AWS GovCloud, Azure Government Cloud and Google Cloud Platform. This adds to the already supported platforms AWS S3 and Azure Hot Blob. The expanded cloud ecosystem combined with the previously announced increased capacity for DD VE – up to 96TB per instance – ensures customers will receive the same level of protection within their growing cloud environments as they receive from their on-premises Dell EMC appliances.

Additionally, Native Cloud Disaster Recovery is now available across the entire IDPA family, enabling customers to cost-effectively failover to a cloud environment with end-to-end orchestration. Customers no longer have to bear the expense and management of setting up and maintaining a secondary site for disaster recovery and can failover to public clouds with ease in case of a disaster event and failback when the issues are resolved. With this expansion, all Data Domain and IDPA models support AWS, including VMware Cloud on AWS, and Microsoft Azure for Cloud Disaster Recovery.

Organisations will also find peace of mind in that all Dell EMC data protection appliances provide modern, simple-to-manage user interfaces. Also, administrators can easily manage multiple Data Domain and DD VE appliances – on-premises or in public clouds – from a single user interface with the Data Domain Management Center.

Enhanced performance

Updates to the IDPA family now provide more performance for Instant Access and Restore with an enhanced data cache that results in up to four times more inputs/outputs per second (IOPS), providing up to 40,000 IOPS with as little as 20 milliseconds latency.

Also, Data Domain appliances provide faster restores from an on-premises appliance and faster recalls from public clouds. Given these enhancements, organisations can now restore their data up to two-and-a-half times faster from a Data Domain appliance and recall their data up to four times faster from the cloud² to a Data Domain appliance, allowing them to meet more stringent SLAs.

More options for mid-sized organisations

Choice and scalability are critical for smaller, mid-sized organisations that require enterprise-level, cloud-enabled data protection. In addition to cloud and performance updates, Data Domain DD3300 – a 2U appliance specifically designed for mid-sized organisations and larger enterprises with remote offices – has new hardware enhancements. 

DD3300 now offers an additional 8TB capacity model that can scale and grow-in-place to 32TB. Also, DD3300 now comes with faster networking capabilities with support for 10GbE and expanded backup options for virtual tape libraries (VTL) over Fiber Channel. These options provide mid-sized organisations with a cloud-enabled data protection solution that can grow as their needs change.

“Data protection efforts are a foundational part of the digital transformation efforts many organisations will embark on by 2020,” said Phil Goodwin, Research Director, IDC. “Purpose-built backup appliances, like Dell EMC Data Domain and Integrated Data Protection Appliance, have become a cornerstone of data availability improvement efforts. They provide faster, more reliable backup with fewer job failures than other data protection options and, more importantly, support faster data restoration in the event of a loss which directly impacts an organisation’s bottom line,” he continued.

As the industry leader in data protection appliances, Dell EMC is committed to delivering continued innovation in our data protection portfolio that supports and improves customers’ adoption of multi-cloud environments,” said Beth Phalen, president, Data Protection, Dell EMC. “Our appliances are powerful, simple to manage and make it easy to expand to public clouds with native cloud capabilities,” she concluded.