By Emeka Aginam, in Las Vegas

In a committed effort to expand its portfolio to address growing challenge of copy sprawl, reduce storage costs, at the ongoing EMC World holding Las Vegas, the United States of America, the technology firm has released Enterprise Copy Data Management (eCDM), that enables organizations to regain control of the spiraling costs of storing and managing multiple copies of the same data.

EMC Corporation is an American multinational corporation that sells data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud computing and other products and services that enable businesses to store, manage, protect, and analyze data.

As expected, the new solution, according to the technology firm enables organizations to regain control of the spiraling costs of storing and managing multiple copies of the same data.
The new eCDM software, EMC said modernizes primary storage and protection efficiency with pan-enterprise data management software and cloud-based analytics service.

Available in the third quarter, the eCDM , according o the promoters would initially focus on addressing copy sprawl in EMC systems, including visibility into VMAX All Flash, EMC VMAX3, XtremIO and EMC Data Domain systems. Similarly, eCDA will be available in third quarter of this financial year.

Speaking on the new development, Beth Phalen, Senior Vice President of Data Protection and Availability Solutions, Core Technologies, EMC Corporation said that, “To modernize business processes, customers need a complete vision of all the data across the organization no gaps, no silos, no misinformation.

eCDM links together a complete picture of the copy data across a business from primary to protection storage, ensuring customers have the right copies of the right data in the right place.

eCDM is the first product to bridge the gap between data protection and data management, addressing the pressing challenge of ensuring the right levels of protection while also addressing copy data sprawl; helping organizations dramatically reduce cost while increasing confidence that their data is protected consistently and completely.”
Customer experience

Speaking from customer experience, the Chief Technology Officer, First National Technology Solutions, James O’Neil, said that, “At First National Technology Solutions, we’re committed to offering the best data center services possible, so we are always working to deliver simple tools that allow our customers to take the complexity out of managing storage through the lifecycle of their data.

“With EMC Enterprise Copy Data Management, we can now provide our customers with more insight into their data, empowering them to make informed decisions about what they’re storing and for how long. We expect this to help our customers to avoid data sprawl as well as monitoring protection compliance.

“Plus, being able to optimize for the right storage platform helps us to control costs, so we’re able to provide competitive pricing as well as additional benefits to our customers.”
Analyst speaks

Also speaking on the product, Phil Goodwin, Research Director, Storage Systems and Software Practice said that, “Businesses are facing a massive challenge when it comes to copy data.

The low cost of storage means that many organizations have taken a relaxed attitude to the number of copies of data stored, but with data volumes continuing to spiral, the financial advantage of addressing the issues becomes significant.

“Furthermore, knowing that you don’t have enough copies on the right storage of critical data to meet service level objectives is a business-critical issue. Solutions like eCDM are designed to help businesses start addressing these challenges now, before they spiral out of control.”

Despite the exponential reduction in the per-gigabyte cost of storage, total storage costs, the firm said can rise as lightweight, zero-cost snaps drive behaviors that encourage businesses to create and keep multiple copies of the same data.

Just as the ‘cc’ function in email can make it too easy to create data sprawl in the email inbox, unmonitored snaps, according to EMC could cause the same problem in the data center.

This is even as IDC has estimated that, by 2018, global businesses will waste $51B storing data on the wrong tier of storage, or storing data they no longer need. eCDM provides companies with a pan-enterprise solution to streamline their processes for monitoring, managing and analyzing copy data.

With the solution, individual administrators, by necessity, continue to create copies of data to meet their needs including data protection, operations, test/dev and analytics.

Without governance of this self-service copy creation, 82% of businesses, the firm said now have at least 10 copies of any single production instance of data. eCDM specifically addresses the inefficiencies and related challenges created by this dynamic, enabling businesses to maximize infrastructure efficiency to reduce costs.

Discovery and automation
eCDM , the firm explained helps modernize operations through automated copy data monitoring and management, adding that with user-defined service plans, organizations can ensure they are storing the right number of copies in the right place, and deliver consistent service levels across the business.

Unlike traditional copy data management products, eCDM, the firm further explained is non-disruptive and provides a holistic view of copy data, while still empowering self-service copy creation. eCDM extends the native efficiencies available within EMC arrays, such as VMAX All Flash, XtremIO and Data Domain systems, to discover existing copies across primary and protection storage without introducing new infrastructure or complexity.

This provides a global overview while still enabling storage and database admins to create and use copies from their native utilities such as Oracle RMAN and storage integrated copy data management.

Optimization
EMC Enterprise Copy Data Analytics (eCDA), a new analytics-as-a-service offering designed to complement eCDM, will provide insight to proactively optimize infrastructure.
EMC eCDA will enable data-driven decision making, including actionable recommendations and service plan modifications to further maximize efficiency