EMC Beefs Up Product Lineup With Help From Acquisitions

Drawing about 7,000 attendees, the event included about 125 solution providers, at least one of whom cited the technology sneak peek as a big reason for making the trek to the show.

"I'm here because this is the best place to sit down with the people that head the technology," said Keith Norbie, director of the storage division of Nexus Information Systems, a Plymouth, Minn.-based solution provider.

EMC's David Donatelli, executive vice president of storage product operations, unveiled some new products plus enhancements to current hardware and software.

EMC officially introduced HomeBase, a bare metal recovery application it obtained via its acquisition of Indigo Stone earlier this year.

Bare metal restore applications provide fast, disk-based recovery for enterprise servers, workstations, or desktops by restoring the operating system and the data in case of a complete system failure. HomeBase complement's EMC's NetWorker data protection application, its Avamar data de-duplication application, and its VMware server virtualization software, Donatelli said.

Jamie Shepard, vice president of technology solutions at International Computerware, a Marlborough, Mass.-based solution provider, said bare metal restore is a great function for customers that do not implement VMware.

However, Shepard said, customers that implement VMware use it to do bare metal restores. "If a physical box goes down, we already have high availability using VMware," he said. "For disaster recovery, we already have virtual machines available in this case. And if a single virtual server goes down, we can restore it with VMware in two minutes."

Norbie said bare metal restore is a great way to simplify the recovery of virtual machines created by VMware. "It's important as part of a solution for backup [and] recovery, especially when you think of an older system that may be dying and the customer wants to bring in a new system," he said.

HomeBase, available now, carries a list price of about $15,000 plus $1,000 for each server.

EMC also introduced Avamar 3.7, the latest version of the data de-duplication software it picked up through its acquisition of Avamar last November. De-duplication, also called "de-dupe," removes duplicate information as data is backed up or archived.

Avamar founder Jedediah Yueh, currently an EMC executive, said the Avamar software now can do de-duplication of data for virtual disk and backup through proxy backup servers under VMware's Virtual Infrastructure 3.0. The new version now supports backups for EMC's Celerra NAS gateway, Network Appliance's Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) and EMC Backup Advisor.

Also new is support for Network Appliance NAS Filers with EMC's DiskXtender file archiving software, Donatelli said.

EMC move to extend its software to support products from NetApp is important to solution providers, Norbie said.

"It shows we can have an EMC solution in a heterogeneous environment," he said. "If I do an assessment and find a lot of Filers, what, I'm supposed to not bring in an EMC solution?"

EMC also updated its RecoverPoint data replication software -- obtained in the Hopkinton, Mass., company's acquisition of Kashya -- so that it now supports Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy (VSS), as well as improved backup and restore automation when used with Exchange and SQL servers, Donatelli said.

Donatelli, too, introduced the EMC Disk Library 6000, a disk-based virtual tape library (VTL) based on the company's flagship DMX-3 array.

The DL6000 is available in two models. The DL6100 supports up to 1,440 Fibre Channel hard drives with RAID 5 protection for a maximum usable uncompressed capacity of 615 Tbytes and just over 1.8 petabytes of compressed capacity, making it the world's largest open systems-based virtual tape library, Donatelli said. The DL6300 supports up to 2,400 drives with RAID 1 for nearly 1.8 petabytes of compressed capacity.

Pricing for the DL6000 VTLs starts at about $1 million, Donatelli said. "They can replace up to five or six individual VTLs," he said.

Next month, EMC plans to release version 2.0 of its Invista storage virtualization appliance, Donatelli said. The new version will support twice the number of storage volumes as the current model, with increased availability and seamless interoperability with EMC's RecoverPoint software.

This fall, EMC plans to make it easier for partners and customers to install its Celerra high-end NAS solution via Celerra Start-Up, a wizard that allows installation to be done with as few as 10 screens and seven inputs, all within 10 minutes, he said.

And early next year, EMC aims to extend encryption of data-at-rest using its RSA security technology for Symmetrix and Clariion arrays, Donatelli said.