EMC Strengthens Software Bid

In a bid to bolster its software arsenal, EMC has released several new data-protection and SAN- management packages that could prove pivotal to the Hopkinton, Mass.-based storage company's growth, particularly as hardware prices continue to drop and margins for commercial gear diminish.

The new products promise to help EMC gain momentum in software, which represented 37 percent of its total revenue for the quarter ended Sept. 30. The opportunity couldn't be better for the storage giant and its partners, particularly as Symantec busily absorbs Veritas. EMC officials point out that Symantec's year-over-year growth for data protection, which includes software and maintenance, was 2 percent, while EMC's was 39 percent. In addition, EMC's backup-and-recovery revenue for the most recent quarter, standing at $50 million, dwarfs that of Symantec's at $284 million.

Now, just weeks after Symantec rolled out a new version of Backup Exec with support for continuous data protection (CDP), EMC has became the latest vendor to jump on the bandwagon with its RecoverPoint CDP software.

EMC is focusing on real-time availability of enterprise data from transaction-oriented systems, while Symantec's BackUp Exec and IBM Tivoli's new CDP for Files focus on providing continuous backup of files.

George Simons, CTO of EMC's data-protection software group, says customers, on average, take snapshots every four to six hours. RecoverPoint tracks all writes to production systems in real-time to a separate storage node designated for recovery. Because the customer is generating continuous streams using CDP, he or she can go back to any point in time.

EMC says RecoverPoint was designed for use in data centers and provides application-aware protection to enterprise-business applications across multiple operating systems. RecoverPoint coordinates recovery of information from groups of applications, which lets administrators restart applications from an exact point in time prior to a failure--an approach that should provide faster resumption of operations, Simons says.

EMC is shipping RecoverPoint this quarter, but won't offer it through channel partners until early next year.

Additional Updates

EMC has also updated its Networker software, which centralizes backup-and-recovery operations. Networker 7.3 offers support for multiple retention policies, which is useful when there are multiple backup targets, such as disk and tape drives, with different policies.

Networker 7.3 also allows multiple backups to a single target device; features increased performance, such as allowing an administrator to run concurrent restores; has an improved user interface; and offers better authentication and security, including 256-bit AES encryption and network address-translation firewall support.

In addition, EMC has rolled out Backup Advisor, a new tool that provides reporting and analysis for backup processes. The software gathers information on an entire backup infrastructure, including software, drives and operating systems, and helps identify problems that may exist in the process. Backup Advisor is suitable for detecting problems before they occur and helping organizations meet service-level agreements, according to Simons.

Finally, for Windows replication, EMC has updated its RepliStor replication software. RepliStor 6.1 adds Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) support, letting customers create and recover multiple point-in-time copies of file-system and application data, and recover Exchange 2003 servers more quickly.