This week’s EMC World conference saw the storage giant announce plans to extend de-duplication technology to virtual storage and introduce a new business process management (BPM) tool.
EMC subsidiary RSA also announced it will partner Cisco to encrypt data stored on tape and other types of storage media, and manage associated encryption keys on storage area networks (SANs) built on Cisco equipment.
EMC Avamar v3.7 will support VMware's Consolidated Backup (VCB) as well as EMC’s Celerra network-attached storage (NAS) systems.
De-duplication (or single instancing) is designed to minimise storage capacity requirements and speed up backups by stripping out repeated content and storing a single copy of a file, or part of a file, in a central location.
“Single instancing is the Nirvana of archiving; data needs to be de-duplicated before it is put in the archive. By their nature VMs create multiple repositories, so bringing those down to a single instance is a very sensible thing to do,” said Mike Davis, senior analyst with research firm Ovum.
The RSA Cisco partnership will include Cisco's Storage Media Encryption, which provides encryption of data-at-rest as a fabric service, and RSA Key Manager, a centralised offering for encryption key lifecycle management.
The TaskSpace BPM application will appear as a new interface within EMC’s Documentum 6.0 enterprise content management (ECM) product and is designed to improve user productivity by speeding up transactional processes.
EMC also introduced a $1m virtual tape library (VTL), based on its Symmetrix DMX-3 array, that scales up to 1.8 petabytes of compressed disk capacity using up to 1,440 drives.
