Announcing Dell EMC Innovations in Data Protection and Data Management

I joined Jeff Clarke on stage at Dell Technologies World to announce major innovations in our data protection portfolio. As we have maintained no. 1 positions in the Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Market and the Data Replication and Protection Software Market, we have been hard at work continuing to innovate without compromise. Dell EMC is powering up our portfolio with the introduction of our next-generation data management software platform and first multi-dimensional data management appliance.

The fact that Digital Transformation is disrupting every industry is unavoidable – and our customers all make it clear that the explosion of data has been hard to manage. Organizations are facing unprecedented complexity and inefficiency, making it difficult to derive business value from their data. Businesses are consuming IT resources differently, and the need for a powerful, efficient and trusted solution to protect data assets is clear.

Protecting data’s value isn’t about locking it away; it’s about providing superior risk reduction for workloads and enabling data reuse. With those goals in mind, we’ve built a platform to help organizations not only retain and manage essential data, but also keep the digital business running.

With the all-new Dell EMC PowerProtect Software platform and the multi-dimensional Dell EMC PowerProtect X400 appliance, we are helping mid-size and enterprise organizations transform their data protection strategy and prepare for the future of business.

PowerProtect Software is a software-defined platform that gives IT staff confidence that their data is protected and available. PowerProtect Software offers efficient data management capabilities across ever-changing IT environments, leveraging the latest evolution of our trusted protection storage architecture. With the flexibility to consume via software or via an integrated appliance, PowerProtect Software provides data protection, replication and reuse, and can be simply deployed on any standard hardware.

PowerProtect Software empowers the entire IT team – allowing data owners to perform backup and recovery operations from their native applications, while at the same time providing central oversight and governance to ensure compliance. We believe this balanced approach to self-service for admins combined with central IT governance is a key element of any team’s data management strategy.

Of course, the PowerProtect Software platform is built with multi-cloud organizations in mind. The platform is multi-cloud optimized, enabling long-term retention via cloud tiering and soon cloud disaster recovery. PowerProtect Software can send data directly to the cloud with no cost, allowing customers to maximize their investment and expand capacity further.

Additionally, PowerProtect Software utilizes SaaS-based management to easily monitor, analyze and troubleshoot distributed environments from anywhere. PowerProtect Software and the PowerProtect X400 appliance enable IT to meet objectives more effectively with evolving operational intelligence.

As with any purchase, we want to make sure the investment is one that prepares our customers for the future. PowerProtect Software leverages a modern, services-based architecture to ensure the ease of deployment, scaling and upgrading that all our customers desire.

Future IT demands are difficult to predict precisely – I have noted how the explosion of data has been hard for organizations to track. Consequently, we developed our new integrated data management appliance to be multi-dimensional.

PowerProtect X400 scales out with linear performance and capacity increases and delivers scale-up, grow-in-place capacity expansion. This allows the appliance to grow with the organization as its IT demands change. As additional scale-out cubes are added to bring more performance and capacity, the X400 uses load balancing enabled with machine learning to deliver optimal deduplication and performance.

Further flexibility comes from the option of hybrid or – for the first time – all flash. In fact, PowerProtect X400 is the industry’s first All-Flash Integrated Purpose-Built Backup Appliance. Providing all-flash as an option ensures that every organization can find the level of performance they need, preparing today’s largest organizations to meet the SLOs of tomorrow.

After using PowerProtect X400 in his environment, our customer Brian Linden, director of IT with Melanson Heath, shared this perspective: “Adding complexity to our data center right now is not an option. The PowerProtect X400 appliance was easy to deploy and configure. Within minutes we protected our virtual machines. The tight integration with VMware and Instant Access allows our IT staff to quickly deploy production VM images for test and development. As a result, we are able to speed up the process for initiating test and development of production applications, making our data center staff more efficient.”

Our continued focus on integration has been key to our leadership in data protection appliances, which makes PowerProtect X400 a natural addition to our portfolio as our first integrated data management appliance.

While we’ve been developing the PowerProtect X400, we’ve also been focused on extending our Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) portfolio, including last year’s DP4400. Today, we also announced an 8TB capacity option for the IDPA DP4400, furthering IDPA’s momentum and market acceleration. According to the latest market data from IDC, both IDPA revenue and unit shipments have grown by more than 10x from 2017 to 2018.

This announcement cements Dell EMC’s commitment to the IDPA platform and conviction that no business is too small for world-class data protection. Now, smaller customers and locations can obtain all the enterprise-level data protection features and functionality of the IDPA family, including simple deployment, easy management, high performance, widest application coverage and cloud extensibility with native cloud tier and cloud DR capabilities, in a smaller capacity appliance. And, as the customer’s needs expand, the new 8-24TB model can easily expand to 96TB with an optional hardware kit that will be available later this year.