Backup has never been about backup – it’s been about recovery, about copy management, and trying to make a necessary evil as simple, and as economical as possible. The economic element also generated a huge industry built on top of the basic fact that tape sucks.
“Backup” has generally focused on two parts – the world of backup apps, and the backup target.
To us – moving “beyond backup” is built on a couple principles:
- Making the backup app something that is not used in backup or recovery (ergo “email backup dude and ask for a restore”), but rather something that instruments, searches/indexes, and enforces copy policy. Operational backup and recovery against those copies increasingly becomes something that is in the app context itself (think RMAN, think BR*Tools, think vCenter).
- Making the backup/archive storage (and doing it at different economic points) something invisible. Ideally – it would be nearly magic :-) Being able to use anything (including the hyper-scale object stores) needs to be a part of that.
Then we need to pull 1+2 together, make it simple – and bam, a necessary evil goes away :-)
We’re not there – but that’s the dream :-)
Today – we announced continued progress towards the dream:
- ProtectPoint support expands beyond Oracle RMAN, and covers SAP (BR*Tools integration), DB2 (ACS integration). This means that array copies can be used to create instant copies with no host load (and 20x faster than many full backups) – and then transparently retain those copies (and recover from those copies) on a much lower cost protection tier using Data Domain (which now can also leverage public cloud object storage – see CloudBoost below). Note: ProtectPoint only works with VMAX3 today (because it uses the ability to access the Data Domain devices), but we are working to bring it to XtremIO and VNX.
- Data Domain gets better (version 1.6 of the Data Domain software has a performance improvement of ~16% on any platform), gets smaller (Project Falcon is a demo is a virtual Data Domain Appliance – working to get this to everyone!), and gets bigger (DD9500 – which is 1.6x faster and 4x bigger than it’s competitors)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MQRbQa3bN4
- CloudBoost. This is the integration of the Maginatics meta-data engine and object access for the purposes of copy management to the public clouds. In an analagous way that CloudArray has brought “Tier to cloud” for EMC primary storage, CloudBoost brings “Tier to cloud” to the data protection tier of storage. Cloudboost is integrated with Data Domain and also with Networker.
- And… in terms of making backup simpler:
- When you do need a backup app that enforces copy management:
- Networker integrates with ProtectPoint, so can act as the catalog for that new form of copies for recovery.
- The Data Protection Software portfolio now has an enterprise wide copy search – think “google search” for your enterprise copies.
You can see from the above that we’re marching towards that holy grail – moving beyond backup, and making copy management simple, low cost, and nearly invisible because operational recovery happens in the app.
Are you a EMC Data Protection customer? What do you think? What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong?
