Dell Software boosts data protection capabilities

Dell Software has launched a major update to its award-winning DR Series of deduplication appliances, including a host of performance and scalability upgrades, as well as the addition of encryption at rest capabilities, and VTL and NDMP backup support. As organisations of all sizes are tasked with protecting an ever-growing volume of data in a faster, safer and more efficient manner, the need for data protection solutions that save time and reduce risk is more important than ever. The latest update to the Dell DR Series of deduplication appliances gives customers the enhanced security, improved performance and increased flexibility needed to meet this challenge while implementing a comprehensive backup and recovery strategy.

Dell’s DR Series of deduplication appliances includes the DR6000 for enterprise organisations, DR4100 for mid-sized companies, and DR2000v for remote offices. All DR Series appliances feature built-in, variable blocked-based deduplication and compression technology, enabling customers to speed backup and restore times while minimising storage requirements by using a backup-to-disk appliance as the repository for protected data. In addition, one of the key tenets of the DR series is all-inclusive licensing and access to new features through software upgrades for existing customers. Key new features and capabilities in the latest release include:

· Performance and scalability upgrades – With the latest release of its DR Series technology, Dell has addressed customers’ need to tackle aggressive data growth by using 6TB drives to increase the maximum capacity of the DR6000 to 252 terabytes (TB) of usable capacity, making it one of the most dense disk backup target appliances on the market, and helping customers lower power and cooling costs in the process. The new release also boosts the DR6000’s ingest performance up to 25TB per hour. In addition, with delivery on the DR4100 of Rapid NFS and Rapid CIFS – the industry’s first source-side deduplication capabilities for NFS and CIFS backup – Dell has boosted its ingest performance up to 17TB per hour, a 150 percent performance increase.

· Encryption at rest – Dell’s DR Series appliances now include encryption at rest capabilities. With data security an increasing concern for most organisations, especially those in the healthcare, finance and government sectors who must meet stringent regulatory guidelines, the need to secure data at all points in the backup process is paramount. The addition of encryption at rest ensures data is encrypted both during the backup process and while stored on disk. For existing DR Series customers who download the latest software release, data already stored on their DR systems also can be encrypted, ensuring that all of their data is secured in a non-disruptive manner.

· VTL support – Many organisations still grapple with the challenges of entrenched legacy tape backup processes, with a large number of embedded applications still sending backup data to tape. With the introduction of VTL support capabilities, DR Series customers can now leverage disk-based virtual tape libraries as their backup target, improving the speed of backups and reducing the risk, cost, and complexity issues commonly associated with legacy tape backup processes. Additionally, DR Series appliances now also support VTL backups using Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM).

· NDMP support – The latest update also delivers network data management protocol (NDMP) support. The enhancement enables organisations currently backing up network attached storage (NAS) systems to save time and lower costs by sending data directly from their storage device to a Dell DR Series target appliance, thus freeing up network resources by using the standard NDMP protocol. This allows customers to move backups directly to the DR backup device, and frees up network resources.