News from EMC World

EMC Corp. announced a number of new product offerings at its EMC World event in Las Vegas, NV last week. The offerings included the Smarts Application Discovery Manager 6.0, new disk library capabilities and options, and new Avamar and Networker releases.

Focal Points:

• EMC unveiled EMC Smarts Application Discovery Manager (ADM) 6.0, improving IT operations' visibility and control of assets in VMware virtualized environments. Smarts ADM complements VMware's VirtualCenter by enabling automatic, agentless tracking and management of configuration changes and understanding virtual-to-physical relationships in the application infrastructure.  The solution continuously provides full visibility into the application services dependencies across a VMware-enabled infrastructure. ADM supports building data protection plans for VMware environments and population of configuration management databases (CMDBs) to leverage and maintain physical and VMware infrastructure information.
• EMC revealed the EMC Disk Library 3D (DL3D) 1500 and 3000 as new backup-to-disk libraries with built-in data de-duplication designed for local area network (LAN) based environments. The DL3D 1500 provides up to 36 TB of usable capacity, while the DL3D 3000 extends to 148 TB of usable capacity.  Both systems use 1 TB SATA disks with RAID6 protection and include optional Fibre Channel ports for storage area network (SAN) connectivity.  All data de-duplication is policy-based.
• The new data de-duplication (3D) option for the DL 4000 allows DL 4000 customers to slow backup storage growth and lower the costs of backup data residing on disk. In addition, there is a new free disk drive spin down option for the DL 4000 series that enables customers to reduce their overall power and cooling costs in a typical environment by 19 percent by putting idle drives in sleep mode. New and existing DL 4000 customers can also take advantage of new low power 5,400 rpm 1 TB SATA drives which require 32 percent less energy than 7,200 rpm drives. Combining both spin down with the low power drives in a new DL 4000 system will consume up to 47 percent less energy, according to company officials. These new features and options are backwards compatible to previous DL4000 models.
• Avamar Data Store Gen 2 is a fully integrated product consisting of the new Avamar V4.0 source-based data de-duplication backup and recovery software running on a new-generation, pre-configured, EMC-certified hardware platform, according to EMC.  It is available in several models, ranging from single node to scalable, multi-node. The new solution provides twice the capacity per server node of the previous generation. A fully configured Avamar Data Store Gen 2 can provide enough capacity to store the equivalent of 1 Petabyte of non-de-duplicated, traditional backup capacity, officials claimed.
• In addition, the new Avamar software now supports 64-bit Red Hat Inc.'s Enterprise Linux 4 and offers expanded client support for Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server 2005; Microsoft Vista; Native Netware client backup and restore (Novell Inc.'s Netware V6.5); and Novell Storage Servers (NSS) volumes on Novell Open Enterprise Server (OES) SLES 10.  Additionally, EMC announced Networker Fast Start, a full version of Networker for mid-sized customers with up to 20 clients. It is a packaged offering with one model number at a low entry-level price. For ease of installation, it has an installation wizard with a minimum number of steps and screens.

Experton Group believes data de-duplication and agentless system discovery and management will become mainstream technologies over the next three to five years in order to satisfy the demand for autonomic automation, cost containment, and improved operations productivity.  Solutions that enhance the management of configuration changes and virtualization will be key to productivity improvements, as enterprises seek to consolidate and virtualize their data centers. De-duplication technology will enable executives to reduce the quantity of data stored to backup by up to 90 percent. This will contain costs and alleviate some of the pressure on backup scheduling. IT executives should evaluate the new technologies from EMC and others to determine which solutions best satisfy corporate requirements, and if and when they should be implemented.