SCIENCE
EMC Delivers UNIX & NT Backups with 'NAS' or 'SAN' Path Selection
HOPKINTON, MA -- EMC Corporation today added a new dimension to its networked information storage leadership with announcement of significant new enhancements to EMC (R) Data Manager (EDM(TM)), reportedly the industry's fastest and most scalable backup and restore solution for open systems. Today's announcements deliver two critical new EDM capabilities that address customers' need for high-performance and cost-effective information backup and restore within today's large, complex Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) environments. The enhancements include: --The ability to perform simultaneous NFS (UNIX) and CIFS (Windows NT) backups, while maintaining all of EDM's rich backup and restore functionality, and --The ability to choose the highest-performance path - either NAS or SAN -- for specific file backups. This advanced feature is achieved through EDM support for EMC Celerra(TM) HighRoad(TM) software, InfoWorld Magazine's Storage Product of the Year. "More than 80% of information storage will be networked within a few years, spelling major opportunity for vendors that deliver rich, high performance backup and restore for all information types," said Chuck Hollis, EMC's Vice President of Products and Markets. "Through enhancements to EDM, new backup and recovery applications and integration with key backup enablers, EMC will continue to deliver the most comprehensive solutions to address the complete spectrum of our customers' recovery time objectives." With wide-scale implementation of multiple host types within today's NAS and SAN environments, bi-lingual backup and restore for UNIX and Windows NT files and filesystems has become essential. EMC today announced EDM bi-lingual support, enabling customers to backup and restore both NFS (UNIX) and CIFS (Windows ) files as a single operation, preserving the specific file attributes associated with the various data types on today's files servers. EMC also announced EDM support for EMC Celerra HighRoad software, enabling EDM to determine the optimal route for data delivery - either NAS or SAN. This advanced feature bypasses the local-area network to move large NFS and CIFS files directly from NAS-attached EMC Symmetrix (R) Enterprise Storage systems over a high-speed Fibre Channel SAN to an EDM-managed tape device. EDM with HighRoad support offloads both file server CPU and network demands, offering increased performance for backup and recovery for large Celerra-based files when compared with local or network backup options. This channel-based backup method also allows multiple EMC Celerra systems to perform high-speed backup to a shared centralized tape library, therefore eliminating the need for dedicated backup resources for each NAS device and lowering the cost of backup and restore in large environments. InfoWorld Magazine this month honored EMC Celerra HighRoad software as the Storage Product of the Year. Known as the technology that effectively ended the debate between NAS and SAN by combining the best of both environments, EMC Celerra HighRoad fuses the industry-standard file sharing of NAS with the high-performance information delivery of a SAN, creating one unified storage network. EDM is a centralized, high-speed, high-capacity open systems backup and restore solution comprising unique EMC software, hardware and professional services. EDM configurations include: --EDM Symmetrix Connect, providing "server-less" and "LAN-less" (direct disk-to-tape) backup and recovery of Symmetrix-resident Windows NT data and very large UNIX databases at hundreds of gigabytes per hour; --EDM Symmetrix Path, providing open, "LAN-less" backup and recovery of large UNIX and Windows NT databases at server-channel speeds, including Symmetrix- and non-Symmetrix-resident data (host-resident data can reside on the host or in non-EMC storage devices and be backed up by EDM Symmetrix Path); and --EDM Enterprise Network, an online network-based EDM solution for simultaneous backup and restore across the network for all major UNIX operating systems as well as Windows NT, Novell NetWare, IBM OS/2 and others. For more information visit www.EMC.com