EMC Data Protection Advisor 6: Vigilance Was Never So Simple

Any IT administrator or application owner who can’t instantaneously verify that vital business data is not properly protected is leaving both themselves and their data exposed. It’s that simple. It’s a perilous and potentially very costly situation.

Today, EMC announced a major update to Data Protection Advisor, EMC’s software product designed to provide real proof of data protection. It’s about real-time visibility into global backup infrastructures.

We’ve taken Data Protection Advisor — EMC’s comprehensive monitoring, analysis and reporting software — and made it even more powerful. Data Protection Advisor 6 (DPA) brings new capabilities to the table that streamline the monitoring and management of backup, including:

  • Self-install and start ensuring protection in just minutes
  • Get rapid access to vital business information with new customize-able dashboards
  • Improve services predictability with new real time monitoring, analytics and alerts
  • New, scalable architecture to meet the needs of today’s cloud, enterprise IT and service provider environments

Exponential storage growth, the transition to cloud computing, and administration of multiple backup and recovery products underscore the need for centralized management and insight into today’s diverse and dynamic backup environments.  That’s where DPA comes in.

DPA 1

Source: ESG Research Report, Trends in Data Protection Modernization, August 2012

Recently, a panel of experts, analysts and customers talked about accelerating IT transformation through consolidation, integration and federation of backup environments. Fast forward to today.  Building out the “federate” component of the strategy – enter proof of that vision: View the live event.

backup-game-day-2-leadspace

The DPA 6 dashboard screenshot below shows a “Clients Not Backed Up” report in the upper left dashboard pane, which provides instant insight to problem areas for this heterogeneous backup environment.  DPA’s reports provide the ability to drill down into data to troubleshoot developing issues before they cause larger problems.

DPA 2

And, there’s support for multi-tenant environments which IT administrators and service providers can enable stakeholders to check backup status and self-verify service levels.

Customers and partner readily see the value of DPA 6 –see what they’re saying.

Imagine the impact of this level of visibility and insight into your environment. One DPA 6 beta user described a scenario where 3 ESX servers went down, instantaneously triggering a vMotion of over 30 clients to new locations, and backups were affected—while he was at lunch.  Fortunately DPA automatically provided an instant alert along with links to the problem source so it could be addressed immediately.

There’s more to learn about EMC DPA 6 in the new data sheet, and there are also several great whitepapers from industry experts here on the value of integrating real-time vigilance and visibility into your global data protection strategy.  Have insights about the value of maintaining a high level of visibility into data protection infrastructures? I’d love to hear from you.  Please share your comments below.

Thomas Giuliano

About the Author: Tom Giuliano

Tom Giuliano is a Product Marketing Senior Consultant at Dell Technologies. With 25 years of IT industry experience, Tom has held roles in Engineering, Product Management, Sales and Marketing. During his 15 years with EMC and Dell Technologies, Tom has held Product Marketing roles in Storage and Data Protection with focus on content creation, messaging, go to market and launch planning and execution. Tom holds a Master’s Degree in Engineering and an MBA and is located in the Boston area.