Data Backup Digest

Dell has, over the past two years, been acquiring a number of products that all relate to the world of backup. Dell is best known for its hardware, available for both business and personal consumers, but the company is starting to make larger investments in data protection and making a move into storage software. Previously, the company only resold other companies’ products.

The firm have now announced that three of these software acquisitions are being bundled together and released as single product: the Backup and Disaster Recovery Suite. The aim of the bundle is to make licensing and costs simpler for those who wish to purchase the products.

The three products included are AppAssure, NetVault and vRanger. Each of these programs does a slightly different thing. Disappointingly, however, Dell hasn’t actually customised them to work together. However, Michael Grant, head of software product marketing at Dell, acknowledged that future releases should hopefully be more coordinated.

AppAssure joins together backup, replication and recovery in a single program. It can work in the cloud, on physical servers and on virtual machines. It creates snapshots of a system quickly, even of servers and infrastructure software. It’s so speedy that it can do a full backup of a system within a couple of minutes.

NetVault, originally created by AT&T, has support for a huge variety of platform support and can write and read from pretty much anything. It has a simple and easy to use interface, plus offers advanced protection for data on a NAS.

Finally, vRanger, developed by Quest Software, offers backup of VMware and Hyper-V virtual environments. The program can be scaled up to suit the largest virtual environments available.

“You can get a new level of resiliency from using this package than from using a one-size-fits-all backup package,” said Grant. “We exposed the [application programming interfaces] across the board for all three of these products and we're now building a Web interface to manage this. As our road map evolves we'll integrate all three of these in different ways.”

The pricing for the collection of programs is set depending upon how much data is backed up through the applications. The pricing is tiered and drops per-terabyte as more data is stored. The pricing begins at $5000 per terabyte but, at the lowest, can go down to $2250 per terabyte.

Dell said that, generally, the price per terabyte they offer to begin with will be less expensive than if you were to buy all three products individually. Nevertheless, the programs are still available to individual purchase should all three not be required.

Of course, Dell isn’t the first hardware company to move into software. Indeed, there are many competitors within the software market at the moment, with IBM, Symantec, EMC and HP all leading the way. And, despite being smaller businesses, Veeam and Actifio are making an impact on the market.

The Dell Backup and Disaster Recovery Suite will be available for purchase at the end of September 2014. Enterprises will be able to purchase it either through Dell directly or their retail partners.