Data Protection Solutions for the Vblock System

Today , I met Chandra Jacobs, Product Marketing  at EMC to talk about her experience at Cisco Live 2013 in Florida  and the solutions she presented.

Chandra – Can you introduce yourself ?

I love creative and challenging projects in the emerging technology product space. I have a background in technology, innovation, and product development, especially as applied to web and mobile development, but have recently expanded into content marketing and digital marketing.

In my role in product marketing at EMC, my specialties are Backup and Recovery Solutions for highly virtualized, converged environments (like the VCE Vblock System) as well as  “Cloud Backup as a Service “(BaaS) for Service Providers, Outsourcers, and Systems Integrators. I am active on social media, often tweeting from @EMCBackup as well as @therestlessroad, and write regularly for TheBackupWindow.emc.com, the Backup Recovery Systems Division blog

Sounds that you had a lot of fun at Cisco Live , but you  also have been pretty busy ?

Yes ! With over 20,000 show attendees, Cisco Live was  all about the power of networking. I hope you enjoyed the play on words—I particularly think it is clever, considering the theme of the conference as well as the value attendees, partners, and customers get out of interacting and connecting with one another.

Representing EMC Backup Recovery Systems here at Cisco Live, I witnessed first-hand exceptional collaboration between EMC partners around booth activity, social media promotion, and product expertise. VCE is the perfect example. In fact I counted up to 4 VCE Vblock Systems on the show floor !
At the EMC booth, the VCE booth, the Cisco Data Center and Cloud booth, the VMware booth !

Not only is that a lot of exposure for a great product, but it also shows the level of commitment and support the partner companies have in making the Vblock System a success.

So in this spirit , how does your team contribute to the success of the Vblock System ?

My team is dedicated to provide the best  Data Protection solutions for the Vblock System, which is built upon a foundation of backup and recovery architected with TLC around leading edge EMC products EMC Avamar and EMC Data Domain systems.

Avamar and Data Domain systems are optimized for highly virtualized environments like the Vblock System, and supported by great partner products from Cisco, VMware, Intel and EMC. While a converged offering is only as good as its components, a converged offering is only as strong as its backup and recovery foundation (in my humble opinion). For example, because of a strong coupling to virtualization in a converged solution, backup and recovery must be optimized for a virtual environment; because of the robust relationship that EMC has with VMware and Cisco, the Vblock System has baked optimized backup and recovery right into VCE’s Data Protection solution.

Not only are EMC backup and recovery solutions pre-configured, pre-integrated, and pre-tested to work across all hardware and software components in the Vblock System, they also are built right into the VCE cabinetry with 10 Gig-E cable direct connects, so that setting up a secondary backup network is no longer necessary. VCE serves as a single point of installation and support for the entire integrated solution, backup and recovery included—by deploying VCE’s solution, you therefore end up with a simplified management strategy of your architecture, while still taking advantage of leading edge technologies from individual vendors.

With EMC backup and recovery for the Vblock, your deduplicated backups can be workload and use case optimized to fit the needs of your data center, with flexible targets of Avamar Data Store or Data Domain Systems.  With tight coupling to your virtual environment through VMware’s vStorage API for Data Protection, Avamar allows you to not only protect your business critical applications running on your virtual infrastructure by setting up application specific backup agents, but also by setting up backup proxy VMs to offload your backup jobs away from your production environment.

Avamar still allows fast deduplication through Changed Block Tracking (CBT) backup and restore so that you are only sending unique “changed” blocks across the network; this allows you to recover 30x faster than traditional VMDK restore. Avamar software also allows universal proxy server load balance across your backup proxy VMs, a single pane of glass to monitor your entire Vblock backup environment through the Avamar Administrator, and easily see the protection levels surrounding your physical and virtual machines (you can learn more about Avamar here).

Data Domain systems provides you with the flexibility to handle a variety of additional workloads, including high-change rate databases, and reduces the amount of backup storage needed by 10 to 30 times, making disk a cost effective alternative to take. In the VCE Vblock System, you can currently deploy either the DD670 or DD890, with the DD990 being qualified shortly. The DD990, provides 570TB of deduplicated capacity for backup storage.

With both solutions, you utilize up to 99% less bandwidth than traditional backup, can reduce backup times by 90%, and reduce the backup storage needed by 95%.

Here’s how it all comes together in the Vblock System, and what you get when you purchase EMC backup and recovery solutions from VCE:

Simplicity often comes in the strength of great partnerships and a great partner network. This is no doubt true for the VCE Vblock System, and demonstrated on the Cisco Live show floor.

That’s great Chandra ! Where can we find more information on these solutions  ?

Here are some suggestions :

Replay EMC Backup Recovery Systems’ EMC World session on Avamar and Data Domain for a VCE Vblock System.

Download the white paper written by expert industry senior analyst Jason Buffington from the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

Watch Jason sum up data protection of a virtualized, converged environment in a short video.

Learn how you can transform your data protection with a solution that’s optimized for virtual environments from our webcast.

Hear Steve Rayda, CTO of Purdue Pharma, discuss how EMC backup and recovery solutions was instrumental in transforming and accelerating his Vblock Systems infrastructure.

Follow me and my team on Twitter @therestlessroad  and @EMCBackup