EMC debuts $1M VTL, adds de-duplication support to VMware

ORLANDO -- Driving home a message that storage management must become more efficient to keep up with the unrelenting pace of data growth, EMC Corp. unveiled a host of new offerings, including a $1 million virtual tape library (VTL) and upgraded de-duplication software, at its EMC World user conference here today.

In a keynote speech, EMC President and CEO Joseph Tucci noted that data centers are being flooded by data from traditional sources as well as from a slew of new sources of content, like digital cameras, phones and personal devices, e-mail boxes and digital music technology. The popularity and usage of online social-networking communities, including Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr and LinkedIn, contribute to that data swell daily, Tucci added.

The new EMC Disk Library 6000 series is based on the EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 platform and features compressed capacity of up to 1.8 petabytes, executives said. The disk-based library is capable of backing up 11TB of data per hour and will be available in June.

Despite its substantial $1 million price tag, the 6000 series VTL should help large enterprises shave costs by allowing them to phase out and consolidate multiple smaller VTLs and backup operations into a single system to purchase and manage, noted officials at Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC.

In fact, Tucci said, disk-based recovery will continue to trump tape-based recovery operations in terms of cost, functionality and speed. "I'll bet you anything you want that going forward, more and more, virtually all [data] recovery will come off of disk and not on tape," Tucci said.

EMC also announced plans to add support for de-duplication across its entire disk library portfolio starting early next year.

Extending its de-duplication technology to data stored in virtualized environments, EMC also disclosed that its June release of EMC Avamar de-duplication software Version 3.7 will include support for its VMware virtualization tools. EMC officials said the support should reduce the size of backup data on hosted systems for VMware customers by as much as 90%.

EMC also unveiled its new EMC HomeBase backup, recovery and archive software, providing bare-metal recovery for servers to augment server state configuration restores.  Currently available, EMC HomeBase starts at $15,000.

Company officials said that EMC NetWorker has been enhanced to feature support for new languages and simplified management and will be available in June. Also, EMC DiskXtender for NAS has added support for Network Appliance Inc. file servers. In addition, and EMC RecoverPoint was upgraded to include support for Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services, for improved backups and restores for Microsoft Exchange Server and SQL Server.