Dell polishes PowerProtect, PowerScale and PowerStore

Dell is strengthening its PowerProtect purpose-built backup appliances with a fleet dashboard, AI assistant and better anomaly detection, and making PowerScale and PowerStore more secure.

PowerProtect is the most popular backup target appliance in the market with its deduplication, wide range of disk and all-flash systems, and support from backup software providers. It was originally called Data Domain and the Data Domain OS has been updated with new features.

Tom Giuliano, Dell’s senior consultant in product marketing for cyber resilience, blogs: “The continued evolution of PowerProtect Data Manager delivers new capabilities designed to help you navigate this complex [threat] landscape.

A new unified dashboard provides centralized visibility across distributed PowerProtect systems. to consolidate monitoring across a customer’s environment into a single view. There is now an AI Assistant to provide contextual guidance, intelligent navigation, and recommendations directly within the Data Manager UI. It should help sysadm staff to resolve problems faster and with greater ease.

Dell is simplifying deployment for PowerProtect Cyber Recovery and CyberSense, as Cyber Recovery Essentials now offers pre-validated reference architectures and standardized configurations with minimal input requirements. The new Data Domain DD3410 is supported as a vault target, and there is enhanced analytics support for Oracle RAC with ASM (Automated Storage Management).

Network connections between PowerProtect systems are more secure as the updated Data Domain OS includes support for Transport Layer Security (TLS) v1.3. This makes secure connections faster (less latency) and more secure (fewer weak options, enforced forward secrecy, encrypted handshake elements) for enhanced security and compliance readiness.

There is good news on the deduplication front for PowerProtect, as Dell’s internal telemetry-based checking has shown that it achieves a 75:1 data reduction ratio, which it says is “the world’s best data reduction.”

Dell has also extended its managed detection and response (MDR) services, helped by CrowdStrike, from PowerProtect to its PowerScale scale-out, clustered file system product to enable earlier detection of suspicious activity and automated response actions.

There are expanded malware detection capabilities to identify anomalies in PowerStore snapshots plus the Anomaly Detection landing page within the Data Manager UI now provides a single space to monitor all anomaly signals across workloads, storage, and protection policies.

There will be more PowerProtect news coming at Dell Technologies World in May.

Availability

• Dell PowerProtect Data Manager enhancements are now available.
• Dell PowerProtect Data Domain Operating System updates are now available.
• Dell Managed Detection and Response (MDR) expansion to Dell PowerScale is now available.
• The entry-level PowerProtect DD3410, announced last September, will be generally available from April 15.