Dell Technologies introduces new EMC PowerProtect DD Series Appliances

• Data loss costs nearly double that of unplanned systems downtime
• New devices are designed to simplify and provide operational efficiencies

BUSINESSES moving to the cloud are an inevitability. But with more businesses entering the cloud game, the amount of data managed is also increasing.

According to the Dell EMC Global Data Protection Index – a study which surveyed 2,200 IT decision makers across 18 countries – organisations in APAC and Japan managed an average of 8.13 petabytes of data in 2018, a 384% increase compared to the data managed in 2016.

Organisations are also increasingly seeing value in data. The same study found that 92% of those surveyed around the world see “the potential value that data holds”, while 36% see data as “extremely valuable” and are currently monetising it. As many are noting, data may very well be the next oil.

Because of this, there’s also an important need to safeguard data. Dell’s survey found that 41% of those surveyed experienced downtime in the last 12 months, with an average cost of US$527,000. On the other hand, the 28% that experienced data loss in the last 12 months garnered an average cost of US$996,000.

In short, as noted by Dell Technologies’ Data Protection Solutions director Saravanan Krishnan, data loss costs nearly double that of unplanned systems downtime.

It is in this context that Dell Technologies has announced the availability of its PowerProtect DD Series Appliances – the next-generation of its Data Domain protection storage appliances – that is meant to help organisations protect, manage and recover data at scale across diverse environments.

On top of this, Dell Technologies has also announced new enhancements to the Dell EMC Cyber Recovery and Dell EMC PowerProtect Software.

Faster and more efficient

The Dell EMC PowerProtect DD Series Appliances are designed to simplify and provide operational efficiencies for data protection for multi-cloud workloads – especially important considering that most organisations have a combination of both public and private cloud use.

Beyond that, PowerProtect DD boasts up to 38% faster backups and up to 36% faster restores, on top of instant access and instant-restore of up to 60,000 IOPS for up to 64 virtual machines, and support for 25GbE and 100GbE network speeds.

Saravanan says that the PowerProtect DD is also efficient, providing up to 1.25PB of usable capacity in a single rack with hardware-assisted compression, which improves logical capacity by up to 30% besides driving up to 65x data reduction. He adds that this smaller footprint delivers power and cooling savings of up to 35%.

PowerProtect DD is also scalable to meet future demands, including grow-in place capacity expansion ranging from one terabyte up to 1.25PB. It’s also meant to provide data protection for multi-cloud workloads, with support across multiple public clouds and can natively tier deduplicated data.

This is all tied together via a single pane of glass management system, where customers can get aggregated management for multiple systems, manage capacity and replications, and monitor the health and status of all their appliances on-premises and in the cloud.

For customers dealing with an influx of data, they will also have to prepare for cyber-threats. Dell Technologies’ EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery is now capable of supporting workloads protected by the PowerProtect Software and stored on Dell EMC PowerProtect DD Series Appliances.

This integration, Dell notes, enables customers to strengthen resilience with automated data recovery and provides peace of mind in the instance of large-scale data loss.

There are new enhancements to Cyber Recovery, which includes the ability to automate restoration from a secure, isolated vault, enabling customers to augment their existing data protection architecture with a secure copy of data removed from the surface of attack.

New servers and datacentres

The Dell EMC PowerProtect DD Series Appliances aren’t the only things introduced in Malaysia recently. Dell Technologies also launched a portfolio of new Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, as well as new Ready Solutions for High-Performance Computing (HPC) and simplified management integration with software and public cloud providers.

The new PowerEdge servers are said to be designed from the ground-up to address complex and varied demands of traditional, emerging and multi-cloud workloads. They’re designed to optimise the 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor capabilities, and are engineered to meet the requirements for multi-cloud environments.

Dell says that the new servers enable improved Dell EMC vSAN Ready Node deployments with an up to 51% increase in input/outpet per second (IOPS) over previous generations of AMD EPYC processor-based PowerEdge systems.

What other new innovations and capabilities do they feature? Efficient TCO will be one of them – the new single-socket designs on them are capable of workloads that require two sockets, so essentially you get hardware and software cost savings and improved total cost of ownership.

The new servers also offer greater bandwidth, featuring up to 26% more PCIe lanes with 60% faster interconnect fabric, enabled by PCIe 4.0. And as for security, they offer built-in security from below the chipset and BIOS to the processor. AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualisation and Secure Memory Encryption is here, so the security does span from virtual machines to system memory.