Christophe's Corner

Today is a great day for backup.  We’ve just announced the general availability (GA) of Hitachi Data Protection Suite 8.0. Did you know that this version is the 4th major release of this powerful unified Data Protection and Data Management solution? Unlike products that find their roots in old code and cloggy architectures, this software is more than just backup—and definitely not your grandfather’s backup solution.

This product is based on an architecture (powered by CommVault – for more info, see Dave West’s blog)  that includes a common technology engine at its core. The engine also happens to be very smart about the data protection processes and their metadata. Unlike other architectures, everything is one place and can be shared to create what I call a data protection continuum. Compare and contrast with other vendors out there: one module for this, one for that, multiple data bases, agents all over the place…You get the idea. The Data Protection Suite manages system and application backup/restore, migration, protection management and compliance management/archiving.

New additions to the Data Protection Suite for version 8.0 include advances in data reduction as well as virtual server, remote office and workstation data protection as follows:

Data De-duplication
Hitachi Data Protection Suite data de-duplication provides customers flexibility to choose when and where to use de-duplication – remote sites, local file and databases, and even to preserve the reduced footprint to tape – reducing overall tape consumption as well

Virtual Server Protection
HDPS provides data protection services for Virtual Machines/servers – VMware or Microsoft Hyper- V. These include file systems and applications found in VM environments.

Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO) Protection
HDPS is designed to trickle replicated data over slow network connections to centralized storage, where recovery points are maintained for remote office recovery.  HDPS replicated data can also be deduped to further reduce the foot print and the amount of data being moved over the network from the remote office.

Workstation Backup
Hitachi Workstation Backup is designed to target the challenge of protecting data at the edge (laptop or desktop) for recovery or discovery featuring the new Workstation Backup Agent (WBA)

More later…..