Dell Technologies Expands PowerProtect Portfolio, Embraces Data Protection Priorities

Dell Technologies on Wednesday expanded its PowerProtect portfolio with the PowerProtect DP next-generation integrated data protection appliances. The vendor also expanded its existing PowerProtect family and announced PowerProtect Data Manager enhancements.

The company’s data protection priorities align with statistics gleaned from Dell Technologies Global Data Protection Index Snapshot latest findings. Some key findings: Ninety-four percent of organizations have cloud deployments (public, private, hybrid) for new applications; 71% of companies agree that emerging technologies increase data protection complexity; and 48% of businesses struggle to find data protection solutions for containers. Businesses are challenged to implement a robust data protection strategy.

Dell Technologies’ Caitlin Gordon

“We’ve been helping customers optimize their backup and recovery, but focusing more recently on how we help with reliability,” said Caitlin Gordon, vice president, product marketing at Dell Technologies. “How do we get the workloads protected faster, enable faster recovery and even instant access in some cases? And how do we make that more efficient?”

Recent industry growth comes from integrated appliances that customers favor for their simplicity.

New PowerProtect Series

The new Dell EMC PowerProtect DP series is an integrated data protection appliance. It represents the next generation of the vendor’s data protection products offering backup, recovery, replication, deduplication, cloud readiness with disaster recovery, and long-term retention to the public cloud.

Dell Technologies’ Rob Emsley

“When customers look for data protection appliance solutions, PowerProtect appliances will be our single family of both integrated and target offerings. This will allow customers to have a choice with respect to target with a choice of software — either our own or third-party solutions, or choosing an integrated option, which is becoming more of the norm for customers when they reevaluate what they want to use next,” said Rob Emsley, director of product marketing at Dell Technologies.

The Dell EMC PowerProtect portfolio supports cloud data protection, VMware integration and cyber resiliency. Additionally, the PowerProtect appliances are available not only in integrated and target but also in physical and virtual formats.

The PowerProtect appliances are available on demand in a pay-for-use model using the vendor’s Flex On Demand. Customers can also buy technical expertise as well as fully managed operations.

Cyber Resiliency for All

Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery protects against cyber threats from ransomware to insider attacks. The on-premises turnkey data vaulting solution received a Sheltered Harbor endorsement. The Sheltered Harbor mission, an industry initiative started in 2015, targets the protection of the financial sector’s cyber stability and recovery capabilities.

However, cyber resiliency is a concern across all industries worried about ransomware.

The third piece of Wednesday’s news focuses on the PowerProtect Data Manager. It now protects data in the public cloud in Microsoft Azure and AWS. Additional enhancements include VMware Tanzu support. Data Manager also offers agentless protection of PostgreSQL and Apache Cassandra in Kubernetes environments. Businesses can now protect Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to back up Kubernetes cluster-level resources.

New Partner Opportunity

As the data protection market continues to grow, partners have the opportunity to help customers manage current data protection needs as well as future ones. Dell Technologies PowerProtect allows partners to build recurring revenue streams while helping customers reduce costs, complexity and consolidate data center infrastructure, the company said.

The PowerProtect DP4400 targets the lucrative midrange market, where partners can accelerate adoption while reselling resiliency and data migration services. Margin potential is even greater when partners co-deliver deployment services or resell ProDeploy services.

“Our partners are a critical route to market for us. The DP series of appliances, just like the DD series — there are many customers that have the previous generation of appliances deployed. So there’s an opportunity for tech refresh,” said Emsley.

In particular, customers with appliances that are more than three years old, are a good target market for partners to go after. Additionally, the cyber recovery opportunity is a net new add-on to many customer environments.