New EMC Data Protection Advisor Software Capabilities

EMC Corporation announced new Data Protection Advisor software capabilities that further automate and expand backup and replication monitoring, alerting and reporting in private clouds. The software, which is running on more than 500 thousand systems at over 1,000 customer sites worldwide, now offers expanded levels of automated analysis that saves time by providing a single view of data protection status.

EMC Data Protection Advisor is management software that automatically monitors, analyzes, provides alerts and reports on all aspects of the protection status of an information technology (IT) infrastructure and is ideal for a private cloud where IT is delivered as a service.

New Data Protection Advisor 5.7 provides deeper visibility into EMC and third party deduplication software, backup applications, virtual tape libraries and applications, including Microsoft Exchange 2010.

Data Protection Advisor simplifies and automates time-consuming, manual tasks. It collects and analyzes information from various heterogeneous backup, replication, file server, database and virtualization technologies into a single customizable interface for faster problem resolution and more efficient audit, compliance, reporting and planning.  New capabilities enable scanning and reporting without the need for agents to be installed on production hosts.
 
A key feature of Data Protection Advisor is automated replication monitoring, which can quickly spot issues and trigger alerts. EMC has added monitoring, alerting and reporting for EMC RecoverPoint continuous data protection (CDP), continuous remote replication (CRR) and concurrent local and remote replication (CLR) on EMC Symmetrix, and CLARiiON storage systems.

Emerson Electric Co., a St. Louis, Missouri-based manufacturer with 120,000 employees in 150 countries is using Data Protection Advisor to enable remote monitoring and automation of all key systems in a new data center. "By deploying the latest virtualization and other technologies, our new data center uses approximately one third less energy and, as we move further toward a private cloud, it will give us the agility to scale and maintain our high levels of service.  EMC Data Protection Advisor will enable our operations staff, backup administrators and the business as a whole, to improve the way we manage the protection and recovery of all of our critical data," said Aaron Plaza, Senior Technology Platform Manager at Emerson. "And now that many of EMC’s backup management capabilities are automated, our data is better protected and we can spend more time working on next generation information technology activities to drive our business forward."

Orange Business Services, the enterprise communications arm of French Telecom, is using Data Protection Advisor with its Symmetrix storage systems and leading SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) and TimeFinder replication technologies to maintain its high levels of service, while reducing costs. "As a service provider we are fully embracing cloud computing and are building an infrastructure that will ensure seamless integration with private clouds. With this model though, we incur penalties if we’re not protecting our customers’ data, one of those penalties is damage to our reputation, which is unacceptable. With EMC Data Protection Advisor for Replication Analysis we were able to quickly identify recovery gaps and drill down to proactively address any specific gap details, saving tremendous time and resources. Without this software, tracking replications is a manual process and if not done carefully is prone to error," said Doug Bovie, Head of Backup/NAS Worldwide at Orange Business Services. "By using Data Protection Advisor in our backup environment, it has allowed us to cut IT costs, improve planning and reduce SLA penalties – which is why we were so excited to have the same visibility for our replication environment."

Presidio Networked Solutions, Inc., provider of professional and managed services for the lifecycle of advanced IT infrastructure solutions, and solution provider for advanced Data Center technologies sells and  deploys Data Protection Advisor. "Our customers make the investment of using replication technology for business critical data and are turning to us to start their implementation of private clouds – it only makes sense to ensure that constant change in their IT environments doesn’t compromise their protection strategies – and that’s where Data Protection Advisor helps us by enhancing our customer’s use of RecoverPoint technology," said Raphael Meyerowitz, Assistant Vice President, Data Center Technical Services, Presidio Networked Solutions, Inc. "Virtualized IT environments are constantly changing, which is where problems can occur – for example, it is easy for a new database to get added but not included in the replication consistency group. Data Protection Advisor automatically alerts for replication gaps so that IT can quickly and proactively resolve exposures and maintain protection policies. Our customers need this visibility and without a product like Data Protection Advisor, it’s a very manual, error prone process to find these types of issues – many times when it’s too late to recover their business critical data."

Availability
The new version of EMC Data Protection Advisor (5.7) will be available later this quarter from EMC and authorized partners it will be available as free upgrade to current customers under maintenance.