V3 Awards: EMC discusses 2013 backup and recovery plans

EMC won the disaster recovery/business continuity company category at the annual V3 Awards bash. Here we catch up with Kelly Brown, product marketing director for EMC's European Backup Recovery Systems Division, to discuss the firm's key successes during 2012 and what is in store for 2013.

V3: What have been the big achievements for EMC's Backup Recovery Systems Division in 2012?

Kelly Brown: There have been two big achievements. The first is related to the number and volume of product releases we have made. We had product announcements across the portfolio, including the release of NetWorker 8. This is a very significant enhancement in that it is a complete architecture refresh of NetWorker, which has been on the market for more than two decades. We released Avamar 6.1, which continues Avamar's strength in backup for enterprise applications and virtualised environments. For Data Domain, we released the DD990 which provides six times the speed and three times the capacity as our closest competitors.

We've always had a strong relevance to high end customers but with these new releases we are increasingly targeting the mid-market and our channel partners. For example we have released two products, the DD160 dedupe appliance and the Avamar Business Edition backup and recovery appliance, both of which are at a price point suitable for our midmarket customers and sold exclusively through our channel partners.

The second big achievement is the endorsements given to the backup technology. For example VMware has embedded Avamar technology as the data protection capabilities packaged into vSphere 5.1. For us that's a tremendous endorsement that Avamar is the best technology in the market for backing-up VMware environments.

What do you think has helped EMC win this award for two years in a row?

I think it's down to our presence in the market and the fact that we are continuing to gain more share. EMC is well known as a technology provider and is driving transformation and back-up transformation. I think the award emphasises who EMC is, and that we do more than storage, providing backup for any kind of data or application that needs to be protected.