EMC Expands ‘Data Protection Everywhere’ Portfolio for VMware Environments

EMC Corporation unveils products and support that optimize the protection of VMware, Inc. workloads across the spectrum of VMware environments to enable protection everywhere.

This includes enhanced support for VMware Virtual SAN, vSphere and expanded data protection options for VCE VxRail appliances.

The integration between company’s data protection portfolio and VMware software empowers vAdmins to provision, monitor and manage the protection of their virtual workloads through the standard VMware interface. The updated version of Data Protection Suite for VMware combined with Data Domain Virtual Edition, provide fast, simple and efficient protection for VMware workloads, enabling continuous end-to-end protection through the native VMware interface. Meanwhile, the support of RecoverPoint for VMs or vSphere APIs for IO filtering, empowers vAdmins to manage replication through vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management, leveraging the common VMware framework.

Data protection and VCE VxRail appliances
As IT organizations increasingly look to hyperconverged infrastructure appliances (HCIAs) to simplify and improve operational efficiency for more and more use cases, they need a wider range of additional capabilities and more cost effective scaling to support those workloads.

VCE VxRail appliance customers can now expand on its built-in protection capabilities and leverage a wider range of firm’s data protection products to provide application consistency for backups as well as monitoring, reporting and backup file search capabilities. Since VCE VxRail appliances are powered by Virtual SAN, they can be deployed with Data Protection Suite for VMs and Data Domain Virtual Edition to provide a solution for businesses which require cost-effective scaling to support workloads, or require monitoring, analysis, reporting and backup file search capabilities, as well as backup and recovery and CDP for mission critical applications including Oracle, SAP, DB2.

Data Domain Virtual Edition architecture diagram

With Data Protection Suite for VMware and Data Domain Virtual Edition announcements, the firm is making the extended protection of VMs on VxRail appliances:

Simple

• Simplified management makes of data protection for VMs fast and easy.

• Centralized monitoring, analysis, reporting and search of backup data gives users one place to find out everything they need to know.

• A single vendor approach offers a unified point of contact for sales and support from hardware to software to protection and enables management through a single native interface

Fast

• Backup times can be reduced by up to 50%. ^(I)

• Recovery times are up to 30x faster when compared to traditional image-level restores ^(II)

• By deploying solutions that are built to work together, data protection for VMs on VxRail appliances can be up-and-running in minutes.

Efficient

• Protection storage requirements can be reduced by up to 30x.

• Up to 1,000 VMs can be continually protected for zero RPO.

• Software-defined protection storage offers simple deployment.

• Support for mission-critical applications, including Exchange, SAP, SQL, SharePoint, Oracle, DB2, Sybase, and IBM Domino for backup and replication.

Data protection and VMware Virtual SAN and vSphere APIs
for IO filtering
For organizations leveraging VMware Virtual SAN, the Data Protection Suite for VMware also provides iDR support for Virtual SAN through RecoverPoint for VMs. Having announced at VMworld 2015 that the company would become VMware’s first replication design partner, this year, the firm becomes the only VM replication vendor to support vSphere APIs for IO Filtering, as it brings a fully integrated virtual replication data services through RecoverPoint for VMs.

RecoverPoint for VMs employs advanced multi-site synchronous and asynchronous replication technology, offering up to zero RPO with any point in time recovery via a highly resilient, no-single-point-of-failure architecture for the most advanced VSAN topologies. Because RecoverPoint for VMs is storage agnostic, replication is supported between VSAN and non-VSAN environments, enabling greater flexibility. And vSphere APIs for IO Filtering integration empowers vAdmins to manage replication through vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management, leveraging the common VMware framework.

Company’s storage and VMware
In addition to its data protection portfolio, the firm will be demonstrating VMware integration in its primary storage arrays at VMworld. Company’s Unity is an mid-range storage array to deliver native support for vSphere Virtual Volumes and Storage Policy-Based Management. The firm has also made available a free community edition of UnityVSA for testing and development usage. This VSA can be deployed in a vSphere environment and provides access to the HTML 5-based user interface allowing users to get insight into how to use Unity. Firm’s VMAX offers continued support for Virtual Volumes enabling native integration for enterprise storage.

The firm will also demo the VMware capabilities of its XtremIO all-flash arrays, such as VSI plug-in, AppSync and ESA, at the show. With its scale-out architecture, XtremIO delivers consistent and predictable performance at sub-millisecond response times making it for the demands of businesses running large numbers of VMs. And its integrated Copy Data Management and deduplication offsets the storage demands created by XCOPY to deliver exceptional performance.

Availability:

• Data Protection Suite for VMware is available.

• Data Domain Virtual Edition is available.

• RecoverPoint for VMs supports vSphere APIs for IO filtering integration now.

• Unity and VMAX support Virtual Volumes currently.

Beth Phalen, SVP and GM, data protection and availability solutions, EMC, said: “Businesses need data protection everywhere – and that’s as true with VMs and converged appliances as it is for traditional storage arrays. EMC’s portfolio approach to data protection, and deep integration with VMware, means that we’re able to offer solutions that can protect data wherever it is and empower our customers to manage their data protection through the native VMware management consoles. EMC’s investment and leadership in data protection for VMware environments is a true testament to EMC and VMware’s better together strategy.“

Yanbing Li, SVP and GM, storage and availability business unit, VMware, said: “Data protection has quickly become a mainstream requirement now that the majority of Virtual SAN customers are running business-critical applications. By integrating with vSphere APIs for IO Filtering, RecoverPoint for VMs is a great DR solution, offering up to zero RPO with any point in time recovery via a highly resilient, no-single-point-of-failure architecture for the most advanced Virtual SAN topologies. This integration makes it easy for customers to optimize the protection of their VM data and enables our customers to have a tightly integrated, efficient, and resilient solution.”

^(I) With Data Protection Suite for VMs, Data Domain Virtual Edition and D Boost on VxRail Appliances
^(II) With Data Protection Suite for VMs on VxRail Appliances

Video: Chad Sakac talks about Data Protection support for VxRail hyper converged appliances.