Dell Technologies rolled out a bunch of updates to its year-old PowerProtect data protection platform today including new integrated appliances for the DP series, updated Data Manager software capabilities for Kubernetes, and cloud data protection for Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the VMware Tanzu portfolio. 

The vendor first announced Dell EMC PowerProtect, its software-defined data protection and management platform, last year at its annual users conference. At the event, it unveiled the product that essentially bundled Dell EMC PowerProtect software and its Data Domain hardware into an integrated Dell EMC PowerProtect DD Series of appliances. These aim to protect, manage, and recover multi-cloud workloads.

Dell EMC PowerProtect DP is the latest addition to the PowerProtect hardware lineup. These systems allow customers to choose their own backup software or use Dell's, or they can purchase an integrated system.

Businesses on average manage nearly 40% more data than they were a year ago, while the estimated total cost of data loss has increased to more than $1 million per organization, according to Dell Technologies‘ Global Data Protection Index 2020 Snapshot. 

That’s a lot of data with a hefty sum. 

This is where the new PowerProtect DP Series appliances come into the picture. Dell says the all-in-one appliances have been designed with modern data workload protection performance top of mind to help customers manage explosive data growth, lower costs, and simplify increasing complexities.

The new DP series delivers performance and efficiency enhancements that allow Dell’s integrated appliances to capitalize on the same capabilities that have been made to the DD series around the introduction of PowerEdge servers.

This results in up to 45% faster restores, as much as 38% faster backups, and instant access and restore of up to 50% greater input/output operations per second (IOPS) compared to the previous generation, said Rob Emsley, director of data protection product marketing at Dell Technologies.

“The ability to spin up virtual machines from the PowerProtect appliances and present those to the users to be instantly accessed, is certainly a popular restore mechanism,” he added.

PowerProtect DP appliances share the DD series’ capabilities of hardware assisted compression with the ability to gain higher logical capacity up to 30%, Emsley said.

Last year Dell also introduced Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager, its software-defined offering that offers users a single interface to protect, manage, and recover data in on-premises, virtualized, and cloud deployments. In February, the PowerProtect Data Manager platform gained support for Kubernetes.

For many backup administrators, emerging technologies such as containers and Kubernetes are introducing new challenges and greater complexity when it comes to data protection. “In fact, over 70% of customers say that these new technologies make data protection more challenging,” Caitlin Gordon, VP of storage and data protection marketing for Dell Technologies, explained. “We're almost at this critical mass level, nearly 50% of all customers are struggling to find data protection for containers.” 

With the update, PowerProtect Data Manager can now offer customers greater choice and flexibility with added support to protect workloads in Azure, AWS, and the VMware Tanzu portfolio. 

According to the vendor, the new integrations make PowerProtect Data Manager the first native vCenter storage policy based management integration for VM protection. This provides IT administrators access to define backup policies within Data Manager directly from their VMware vSphere environment.

Finally, PowerProtect Data Manager offers agentless protection of PostgreSQL and Apache Cassandra in Kubernetes environments. The update now extends back up Kubernetes cluster-level protection to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).