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EMC Pulls Forward With Backup
CDP's just one part of the vendor's SNW backup story
October 24, 2005
3 Min Read
The continuous data protection (CDP) party may have started a couple years ago, but EMC's none too concerned about arriving late, with three products in tow.
This week at Storage Networking World, the vendor plans to unveil RecoverPoint enterprise-class CDP software, along with an upgraded version of Legato NetWorker and Backup Advisor software for reporting and analysis.
"We dont see CDP as necessarily a new point product -- it's really a technology to help us evolve our backup and recovery archiving solutions," says Rob Emsley, director of product marketing for the EMC Software Group.
Here's a rundown on the new gear:
RecoverPoint protects a variety of environments, whether Windows, Unix, file-based servers, or SANs. EMC is also trumpeting RecoverPoint's tight integration with Oracle and SQL Server applications.While RecoverPoint uses CDP software licensed from Mendocino, EMC's own software engineers have added several enhancements, like coordinated recovery of groups of related applications. That enables customers to restart applications from the same point in time, handy for those instances where transactions draw on an often complex tangle of databases and applications.
EMC says such coordination means customers can do "significant point-in time" recovery -- geared to end-of-quarter financials, for example, or right after a system-wide patch has been installed. But an EMC spokesman emphasized the vendor is not reselling the Mendocino CDP appliance, as Hewlett-Packard has chosen to do. (See HP Picks Mendocino .)
A RecoverPoint engine and driver resides on every host from which a customer wants to provide recovery services. Up to 16 production hosts can be assigned to a single engine. The software will be available by the end of the year; pricing starts at $75,000.
Legato NetWorker version 7.3 provides speed and performance improvements for centralized backup management. In addition to a new GUI, NetWorker has built-in reporting and multiple configuration windows, as well as 256-bit AES encryption. NetWorker will also be available by the end of the year with a starting price of $10,000.
Backup Advisor gathers information from backup software, tape drives, and the backup server operating system, and analyzes it to identify and resolve backup process and operational issues. It supports Symantec/Veritas's NetBackup and Backup Exec products and IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager. "Customers with multiple applications can manage backup a little more broadly and customize the information they gather on specific applications," Emsley says. Backup Advisor is available now at $130 per host.
Does the CDP market really need EMC's participation to be taken seriously? Surprisingly, a customer and one analyst both say yes. "EMC's participation doesn’t matter to me so much, but I see real value to those big players getting into the market," says Steve Perry, IT director at Costello and Sons Insurance Brokers in San Rafael, Calif. CDP-like backup is a natural add-on to the arrays and management software EMC sells and that customers will want, notes Perry, which uses Mimosa Systems to back up 35 Gbytes worth of Exchange server data.
"EMC and HP coming really blesses the technology from the startups," like Revivio and others, says Dianne McAdam, senior analyst and partner with Data Mobility Group. "Customers may have been sitting on the fence, and I think this changes the market and makes it more viable in a lot of people's eyes."
Whether EMC's late or not, it sounds like a big party to us.
— Terry Sweeney, Editor in Chief, Byte and Switch
Organizations mentioned in this article:
EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC)
IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM)
Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC)
Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ)
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