This is cool.
Every customer needs Data Protection for their VMware environment – local backup and recovery, and protection from disaster recovery.
I’ve seen every chapter of this – from the birth of Site Recovery Manager in 2008 (to Jay Judkowitz – shout out to you buddy!, the birth of CBT in 2009, along with VDP and VADP, and the emergence of Metro Stretched Clusters in 2011.
If I pull out VMworld sessions from years gone by, I can see engineering blood sweat and tears, customers, and more.
What’s the common thread? For as long as information persistence matters (and it always will) – data protection matters… a lot.*
* even in the world of cloud native apps – where most persistence is in geo replicated object stores and next generation data fabrics (vs. monolithic RDBMS databases), there’s room for innovation around data protection. More on this in another future post.
Data Protection is also an area ripe for reinvention and disruption. We have a great offer today with Data Protection for VMware leveraging VADP, DDBoost, and Data Domain. This is part of our HCI strategy – where customers choosing VxRail, VxRack, and even XC can integrate a great backup choice deeply integrated with VMware.
That said – this is an area that is hot, and filled with startups. You can see a lot of startup activity here for a good reason – there’s customer pain, and there are new an interesting approaches that can be taken.
We’re one of the backup leaders, with overwhelming market share leadership with Data Domain, but that means you can’t rest on your laurels. In fact, when you are the leader, everyone comes gunning for you. It’s natural!
Today’s announcement is the first part of of a multi-chapter saga: 1) tackling how we move data; 2) how we build next-generation management, policy/automation and build in AI and ML for data protection; 3) how we persist copies of data; 4) how we reinvent data protection for cloud native apps.
I’m going to start with a story.
We have a customer in APJ who is one of the largest Horizon projects that I’m aware of in the world. It’s a very challenging case, and it’s a customer leaning into new ways to tackle massively distributed branch locations. They have 25,000 branches – and their business is part of the country running. Part of tackling a new way forward, they don’t just want to do what they do today better – but they want to offer services that they couldn’t before.
They want (are demanding in fact) to deliver something these branches have never had before – simple and fast disaster recovery. Previously if the branch had a local disaster – that was pretty well it.
Our solution for them is Recoverpoint for VMs 5.1.
Several weekend ago, we ran a disaster recovery and failback test for 2000 branches. We failed them over in an average of 27 minutes. They ran for a day remotely, and then failed back in an average of 19 minutes.
Think about that. Big scale. Support for sync and near-sync replication. Best-in class data reduction. VM-level implementation. 100% software. Runs on any infrastructure stack.
It’s for that reason that I think that Recoverpoint for VMs (RP4VM) is one of the most powerful tools in the Dell EMC/VMware arsenal.
It’s not an accident that RP4VM is included with VxRail, and we will be bringing it to VxRack SDDC.
With RP4VMs 5.1 it’s better than ever, and simpler than ever. There’s better scale, better automation of network changes. Can we make it better? You bet. Will we? Count on it.
But – RP4VMs can be thought of not just as a DR tool, but a copy-data management and data transfer engine – one of 3 critical pieces for a next-generation data protection strategy (the other two being a policy/AI/management, and next generation purpose-built backup targets).
This is what we’ve done today – we’ve made RP4VMs an integral part of Dell EMC’s Data Protection Suite for VMware, and in the process, created a “Hypervisor-Direct” data path that is 5x faster and more efficient than CBT and VADP.
The ESXi integrated splitter in the vmkernel is much more perfomant than VADP – but we retain all the beautiful elements of software-only data movement (no Recoverpoint appliances need), and VM-level policy. You can hit Data Domain, and you can also leverage external Object storage, any S3-compliant cloud storage and also of course our own Virtustream Storage Cloud – all to crush the cost of long-term copy retention.
How do you “drive” this? Simple. It’s integrated right into the two most important tools for a VMware admin: vCenter (including the HTML 5 client of course) and also deep vRA integration.
Furthermore – at VMworld, VMware announced availability of the VMware Cloud on AWS. That data needs protection too – and the idea of moving it out of AWS is insane (darn data gravity). How are people going to back that s#$% up?!?!
Answer = simple. The same core Dell EMC Data Protection we’re talking above… is the first data protection for customers using VMware Cloud on AWS. Tada!
Remember how I said that a couple other things are needed to complete a real next-generation, ground up data protection strategy? One of the other parts was policy, automation and management.
Enterprise Copy Data Management (eCDM) does the this. There are guardrails to automate like crazy:
We aren’t stopping there. Any next-gen data protection strategy needs to also include AI – no human on their own can manage the data protection copies, and ensure that they are compliant.
Add it all up – what do you get with a modern data protection approach?
- Up to 72x Data Reduction rates.
- Less than 5 minutes to deploy and configure a proxy – and almost completely hands off.
- Up to 98% reduction in network usage.
- 20x faster than traditional recovery.
- 50% faster backup time.
- … With new
- … all easier to scale, with broad use case support, and support for both a software-defined datacenter, and also things like VMware Cloud on AWS.
People – if you’re still backing up over your LAN, and for goodness’ sake to tape, there’s a better way.
Awesome work, and a huge congratulations to the Data Protection team, and my sister in the “Gang of 5” (inside reference), Beth Phalen and her team!
We’re not stopping here. We are the Data Protection leader, and are working overtime. Lots to do – and lots of hints laid in this blog post. We’ll be continuing this dialog in posts to come… But even right now, the Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for VMware just took a giant leap forward for our customers!
This is good stuff! Appreciate the great work indeed!
Posted by: Edward Sorgi | September 01, 2017 at 02:00 PM