EMC updates backup and mid-market storage lines

EMC World 2010: EMC has rolled out a series of updates for its enterprise back-up and mid market storage lines.

Central to the rollouts was a pair of new technologies which the company believes will drastically speed up their respective tasks.

For backup systems, the company is introducing a new software tool to help servers communicate with backup servers. Known as Data Domain Boost (DD Boost), the new protocol will allow administrators to optimise the connection between the client server and backup server.

"We were always limited by the language that was used to move the data from the target server to the storage," said Frank Slootman, president of EMC's backup recovery systems division.

"We are unclogging this massive fire hose that exists between the file server and the backup server."

Through the use of Boost, EMC estimates that overall Data Domain performance can be boosted by some 50 percent, while the use of bandwidth on the backup server can be dropped by anywhere from 80 to 99 percent.

The company said that it will make the DD Boost tool available for both EMC's NetWorker backup tool as well as backup systems from Symantec.

Slootman stressed that the software would not become an exclusive offering for EMC and that it would welcome talks with other backup vendors to use the software.

For the mid-market storage space, EMC has unveiled an update to the Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) system.

The virtualised storage tool allows for SATA, fibre channel and solid-state drives to be viewed as a single storage unit with the most widely-requested code placed in the fastest storage medium.

The FAST v2 update will not only prioritized high-demand files, but will also allow for the highest priority bits of code within a file to be placed into high-speed storage platform.

Additionally, the tool will allow for a portion of solid-state drives to be allocated as a disk cache to further speed performance.

EMC estimates that the FAST v2 system will lead to as much as a 35 percent drop in file system workload times and in some cases double the speed of SQL server performance.