Dell Technologies Streamlines Data Protection for VMware
Dell Technologies today unveiled an approach to capturing snapshots used to protect data in VMware environments that promises to reduce the total cost of defending organizations from ransomware.
Rob Emsley, director of product marketing for data protection at Dell Technologies, said Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager with Transparent Snapshots employs I/O filtering to create an initial snapshot of a virtual machine that is then stored on a local backup and recovery appliance.
Installed as a plugin on hosts running VMware ESX virtual machines, Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager with Transparent Snapshots only needs to capture delta changes to the virtual machine rather than requiring organizations to continuously take snapshots of the entire virtual machine, said Emsley.
Thwarting ransomware attacks requires organizations to have a pristine copy of their data available in the event it is encrypted. However, continuously backing up multiple virtual machines can be both costly and time consuming. Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager with Transparent Snapshots provides a lighter-weight approach that makes it easier to achieve both recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) by streamlining the backup process, said Emsley.
At the same time, Dell is previewing a Dell EMC PowerProtect appliance with a Smart Scale offering to enable IT teams to logically pool the management of up to 32 appliances. Dell said it plans to make the appliance available in the first half of 2022 and that it will enable organizations to backup exabytes of data more easily. Dell is also adding a managed service through which it will manage backup and recovery tasks on behalf of organizations.
A Dell Technologies Global Data Protection Index (GDPI) survey of 1,000 global IT decision-makers published today finds 62% of respondents are concerned their existing data protection measures may not be sufficient to cope with malware and ransomware threats. Over two-thirds (67%) lack confidence that all their business-critical data can be recovered in the event of a destructive cyberattack or data loss.
Nearly three-quarters (74%) also noted their organization has been subject to increased exposure to data loss from cybersecurity threats with the growth of employees working from home.
The survey also finds organizations are managing more than 10 times the amount of data than they did five years ago, with 82% noting they are concerned their existing data protection solutions won’t meet all future business challenges. Nearly two-thirds (63%) said emerging technologies such as cloud-native applications, Kubernetes containers, artificial intelligence and machine learning pose a risk to data protection. In fact, lack of data protection solutions for newer technologies ranks among the top three data protection challenges for organizations.
More than 30% or respondents also admitted their organization has lost data in the last year, with nearly half (45%) experiencing unplanned system downtime.
Most organizations today have multiple data protection platforms installed. Most of the data being protected ultimately winds up in the cloud. However, when it comes to being able to quickly recover data in an on-premises IT environment, there is no substitute for a local appliance.
