Business and technology landscapes continue to evolve rapidly. As a result, businesses today face many challenges. Data growth and democratization have resulted in more and powerful next gen applications. Shrinking business cycles exert a constant pressure to improve time to value for IT investments. The result? Businesses are increasingly transitioning to the software defined data center (SDDC) model and leveraging cloud for flexibility, agility and economics. While the shift towards SDDC and cloud has enabled unprecedented agility and flexibility, it has led to challenges for data protection, especially as it concerns virtualized workloads:

• Virtual Machine (VM) and media server sprawl as a result of the growth of virtualization and the ease of spinning up new VMs
• Increasingly stringent protection requirements due to government regulations and organizations increasingly virtualizing more business critical applications
• Shrinking backup windows due to the need to protect more applications and more data

Data protection needs to modernize to keep up with demands of today’s VMware virtualized workloads, and transform to seamlessly protect tomorrow’s mission critical applications and support hybrid cloud initiatives.

Are other data protection alternatives ready?

Legacy SAN and network-based data protection solutions are not made for the modern data center (i.e the SDDC) and do not provide holistic protection for VMware environments.  These alternatives provide limited automation – primarily automate VM backup policy management. Due to architectural shortcomings, they are complex and expensive to scale, and provide slower backups and recoveries, especially as the numbers of virtual machines goes up.

Architecture matters – Dell EMC provides modern, transformative VMware data protection

Dell EMC data protection is architected for the modern and software defined data center. It supports a comprehensive application ecosystem. Our solutions provide modern, transformative and automated data protection for today’s and tomorrow’s workloads:

• Automation across the entire VMware protection stack (VM backup policy, data movers/proxies and backup storage)
• Simple and elegant scalability with VM growth without media server sprawl. Less than 5 minutes to deploy and configure a virtual proxy.
• Best in class performance and data efficiency with less capacity and bandwidth required – 72x deduplication rate and 98% reduction in network usage
• Transformational management functionality that is designed to enable self-service to vAdmins, including native leading integration with vSphere UI and vRA, with oversight by backup/infrastructure admins
• Faster backups and restores – backup times reduced by up to 50 percent and up to 20 times faster recovery for VMs with flash enabled backup storage.

Keeping pace with IT transformation demands – VMworld announcements

Dell EMC is committed to bringing innovative solutions to meet rapidly evolving customer needs. At VMworld this week, we made two new announcements that will make it even easier for you, our channel partners, to boost your strategic value to customers who are looking for modern, simpler and more efficient VMware virtualized workloads protection:

• Data Protection Suite for Applications Enhancements: Hypervisor and application direct backups for high IO/change rate, mission-critical workloads
• Data Protection for VMware Cloud workloads on AWS: Data protection for workloads on VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Data Protection Suite for Applications Enhancements

Businesses increasingly face technical and organizational challenges in protecting virtualized mission critical and high change rate applications.  From a technical standpoint, traditional VMware vStorage API (VDAP) and agent based backup approaches simply can’t keep up from a recovery window perspective for these large rapidly changing virtualized applications and databases.  From an organizational standpoint, there is a proliferation of backups from a variety of different roles (Backup Admin., VM Admin., App Admin, even Cloud Admin), which makes it very difficult to have backups that are in sync, coordinated and compliant. Dell EMC introduced a new hypervisor-direct data path with application consistency that resolves both issues, providing an express data path that is 5x faster and delivering data protection capability to application owners within the governance and oversight of IT.

Data Protection for VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware announced at VMworld 2017 that they will be offering VMware Cloud on AWS – the ability to run VMware virtual machines on AWS. Dell EMC has partnered with VMware to deliver the first data protection solution for these VMware Cloud workloads on AWS. Providing protection for VMware Cloud on AWS furthers Dell’s leadership in supporting customers in all the phases of their cloud journey:

• Long term retention to the cloud
• Disaster recovery in the cloud (AWS)
• Protect workloads in the cloud, including VMware Cloud workloads on AWS (New)

These next-gen data protection solutions are architected for the modern SDDC and cloud enabling data protection modernization, automation and transformation.

Ideal VMware data protection for your customers

Dell EMC also provides your customers more financial flexibility with a new flexible consumption model, including subscription pricing for our software and pay per use pricing for our backup storage, that lets them pay for their data protection in a way that makes the most financial sense.

Combined with our architectural advantages and new announcements, you can rest assured that you are providing your customers with data protection that will modernize their environment, simplify management tasks, reduce costs, and enable them to transform to a software-defined and cloud-centric data center through automation, innovation and native integration with VMware.

For more information, visit the Data Protection Solutions for VMware webpage as well as the Sales Resource Center/Partner Portal Product Enablement Center.

Richa Dhanda

Director, Product Marketing at Dell EMC

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Tags: AWS, cloud, Data Protection, vmware, vmworld