Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

New Cloud Backup Pricing Targets Recovery: Page 2 of 2

As if Asigra's news wasn't enough for the backup world, EMC conducted one of its over-the-top events in New York, announcing a new series of Data Domain appliances for the middle of the product line. The DD2500, DD4200, DD4500 and DD7200 range from about 60 Tbytes to 428 Tbytes of usable capacity. As usual, EMC is taking advantage of advances at the component level using newer Xeons and bigger disk drives.

I just wish EMC would adopt the model Quantum did a few years ago and reduce the number of models while broadening the capacity range each model supports. There are now seven Data Domain appliances; I, for the life of me, can't imagine why there need to be more than four or five.

In addition to the new Data Domain boxes, EMC has continued its integration of Avamar with both Data Domain and Networker. You can now back up directly from Avamar clients to Data Domains, eliminating the need for a separate Avamar data store.

Other enhancements from EMC include better deduplication from applications like Oracle RAC and direct backups from SAP HANA. The integration effort is going so well that the EMC execs say about half of their software sales are for the unified (OK, bundled) suite that includes Networker and Avamar.

The most significant of EMC's announcements is support for what it calls "Instant Access," which lets vSphere hosts directly access virtual machine images that were backed up to a Data Domain box via Avamar in under 2 minutes.

I believe this feature allowing virtual workloads to be recovered without waiting for the data to be restored from the backup repository, which first appeared as Veeam's vPower a couple of years ago, will soon become a standard feature in the backup market.