Data protection for VMAX3: High Performance Data Protection for Your High Performance Storage

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1EMC has once again as raised the bar on storage leadership with the announcement of the new VMAX3.  Much more than primary storage, VMAX3 is an Enterprise storage services platform, designed to enable I/T to control where to best run specific workloads, whether in the data center or the cloud. With VMAX3, IT can manage Storage-as-a Service through predictable service levels at hybrid cloud scale.

Would you ever race a Formula 1 car without protection? Of course not! So, when it comes to protecting data stored on the fastest and best storage in the world, VMAX3 , look no further than the same company for world class data protection -EMC. Then , sit back and enjoy the speed and thrill of VMAX!

Complementing this agile, intelligent storage platform, the newly announced ProtectPoint and VMAX3 support by VPLEX, RecoverPoint and Networker continue to expand EMC’s Data Protection Continuum.

What is the “Data Protection Continuum”? Simply put, it’s a set of ever expanding solutions and services that provide end to end data protection for your business. If you have data, EMC’s Data Protection Continuum can protect it. That’s what has helped make EMC not only the world’s largest data storage company but also the world’s largest data protection company.

Check out this video overview of data protection storage for the VMAX by Alex Almeida from our Data Protection and Availably team

ProtectPoint reduces the cost and complexity often associated with traditional backup of primary storage by eliminating the impact of the backup on the application server, giving you point in time snapshot-like performance along with  the functionality of a traditional backup.  How? By pausing the application only long enough to mark the point in time for the application consistent backup, letting the application return to its normal operation. Since the data is sent directly from the VMAX3 to a Data Domain system, there is no impact on the application server as in the case of traditional backup software. Now, with faster backups using ProtectPoint and VMAX3, an increase in backup frequency is possible. Full backups can often be taken in a timeframe that was previously possible only for an incremental backup, improving the granularity of recovery. Network bandwidth is saved as well when protecting the new VMAX3 with RecoverPoint because only the unique data needs to be sent to protection storage. This means backup storage requirements can be reduced as much as 30x.

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But what about improving Active-Active availability and migrations? VPLEX, EMC’s continuous availability and data migration platform complements the VMAX3 extremely well, leveraging VPLEX’s distributed virtual volume “stretched cluster” which can move industry leading application data from companies like Oracle, VMWARE, Microsoft, IBM, Symantec and Redhat, without disruption, load balancing by application. Onboarding of data from an older array to a VMAX3 can be done non-disruptively, for faster “time to production” than was previously possible thanks to VPLEX and the new VMAX3.  Additionally, the concurrent local and remote replication capability of RecoverPoint provides continuous data protection with point in time recovery. When VPLEX and RecoverPoint are used together in a MetroPoint topology, continuous disaster recovery and operational recovery for two datacenters is possible and with remote replication to a third site, EMC makes it possible to sustain a two-site failure with only a single DR copy of your data.

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NetWorker’s management of snapshots and related policies is well, a snap! Its management interface provides the “single pain of glass” manageability that is desired to make data protection as easy as possible. Networker’s intelligent wizard can discover snap-capable objects and filesystems as well as reverting to traditional backup methods for objects found on direct attached volumes.  Networker supports application consistent snapshots for DB2, Oracle and SAP. Recovering a snapshot is also quite simple using the Recovery User Interface within NetWorker Management Console (NMC) with great granular recovery.

What to read more? Check-out our new Data Protection Solutions Brief for VMAX3: VAMX3 Data Protection solutions Brief

About the Author: Paul Scheuer

Paul Scheuer is head of Marketing for Dell EMC’s mainframe storage products. He has led the PowerMax & VMAX for mainframe and DLm teams through many mainframe product launches since 2013. Paul is also active in the mainframe industry organization SHARE, as a member of the Marketing committee.
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