Dell Rolls Out Major Software Updates To DR Backup Appliances

Techgage hasn’t had much of an enterprise presence in its ten years of existence. Brett has penned some incredible editorials, at times extending a bit into the world of big business, but on the whole we have been devoid of stories, articles, and news from that side of the industry. As we’ve mentioned in the past, we are revamping our NAS test platform so we can start to look at enterprise-level hardware, but we are in the early stages of planning and are a few months out from revealing what exactly it is that we are doing. All that said, we deal with companies on a regular basis that straddle the industry by offering products in both segments. Through past collaborations, we sometimes get access to exciting news and in turn, pass it along to our readers.

Dell’s DR6000

Updating its award-winning DR series of deduplication appliances, Dell Software introduces encryption at rest and improves on performance and scalability. Additionally, it’s added VTL and NDMP backup support. These additions and improvements aid organizations of all sizes in protecting their data in a “faster, safer and more efficient manner.”

The Dell DR Series OS 3.2 is available today to all customers free of charge with latest software download. The appliances themselves are available direct from Dell or through channel sources.

In Dell’s own words, the update adds:

Performance and scalability upgrades – With the latest release of its DR Series technology, Dell has addressed customers’ need to tackle aggressive data growth by using 6TB drives to increase the maximum capacity of the DR6000 to 252 terabytes (TB) of usable capacity, making it one of the most dense disk backup target appliances on the market, and helping customers lower power and cooling costs in the process. The new release also boosts the DR6000’s ingest performance up to 25TB per hour. In addition, with delivery on the DR4100 of Rapid NFS and Rapid CIFS – the industry’s first source-side deduplication capabilities for NFS and CIFS backup – Dell has boosted its ingest performance up to 17TB per hour, a 150 percent performance increase.

Encryption at rest – Dell’s DR Series appliances now include encryption at rest capabilities. With data security an increasing concern for most organizations, especially those in the healthcare, finance and government sectors who must meet stringent regulatory guidelines, the need to secure data at all points in the backup process is paramount. The addition of encryption at rest ensures data is encrypted both during the backup process and while stored on disk. For existing DR Series customers who download the latest software release, data already stored on their DR systems also can be encrypted, ensuring that all of their data is secured in a non-disruptive manner.

VTL support – Many organizations still grapple with the challenges of entrenched legacy tape backup processes, with a large number of embedded applications still sending backup data to tape. With the introduction of VTL support capabilities, DR Series customers can now leverage disk-based virtual tape libraries as their backup target, improving the speed of backups and reducing the risk, cost, and complexity issues commonly associated with legacy tape backup processes. Additionally, DR Series appliances now also support VTL backups using Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM).

NDMP support – The latest update also delivers network data management protocol (NDMP) support. The enhancement enables organizations currently backing up network attached storage (NAS) systems to save time and lower costs by sending data directly from their storage device to a Dell DR Series target appliance, thus freeing up network resources by using the standard NDMP protocol. This allows customers to move backups directly to the DR backup device, and frees up network resources.