In addition to the new offering, which will let Dell partners who were already working with Druva apply that business to the Dell Partner Program, Dell is also announcing the addition of Google Cloud to the Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager cloud ecosystem, and the ability to lower snapshot retention costs with joint availability of PowerProtect Cloud Snapshot Manager and PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition.
Today, Dell Technologies is introducing Dell EMC PowerProtect Backup Service, a new cloud-based data protection solution. It is not Dell’s own technology, but comes through a collaboration with Druva, a longtime player in the cloud protection market.
“We are introducing a new cloud-based data protection platform – Dell EMC PowerProtect Backup Service – which will be generally available May 18 on a global basis,” said Rob Emsley, Director of Product Marketing, Data Protection, Dell Technologies.
Most of Dell’s technology is organically developed, but Emsley said partnership here was dictated by time to market considerations, in a market where SaaS enterprise backup products are already being sold by both long-time players and high-flying startups.
“As we saw a lot more movement to cloud, we had a decision to make,” he commented. “Do we organically develop a solution, or do we quickly enter the market with a fully formed offering. We decided for the latter to get something for all of our customers to take advantage of because of what we saw happening with the cloud. It’s a time to market issue.
“If you look at who we compete with, PowerProtect Backup service ticks a lot of boxes,” Emsley added. “We don’t just support Exchange Online with this. We support OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint as well. With this Druva relationship, we have leapfrogged many of the competitive relationships out there.”
Dell has some familiarity with Druva because Dell Capital is an investor in the company, but Emsley said that the choice of Druva as the partner for this offering was the result of a full search.
“We started looking last year for a company to work with, to expand our cloud data protection portfolio to support SaaS,” he noted. “Early this year we enabled our sales teams to resell Druva, which was a precursor to this.”
Dell of course owned Spanning at one point, which also happens to be a SaaS backup solution. It was originally acquired by EMC and passed to Dell with the merger. It was then quickly sold off to Kaseya, although Dell has continued to offer it as a resell option. Emsley, who was at EMC when Spanning was acquired, said there really isn’t a valid comparison between the two products, however.
“Spanning is still one of our resell options but we wanted to go to the next level,” he said. “Druva is just a more comprehensive solution, with a mature cloud platform built on AWS, and greater performance and scalability.”
Emsley also stressed that the Druva partnership will have additional benefits for Dell partners who were already working with Druva.
“The partnership gives Dell partners who had a prior relationship with Druva the ability to credit their Druva business into the Dell Partner program, just as new business with the PowerProtect Backup service will count,” he said.
In addition to the PowerProtect Backup announcement, Dell is making several additional announcements relating to their cloud ecosystem.
“Our PowerProtect Data Manager, which was introduced at the 2019 Dell Technologies World, and which have been available on Azure and AWS, is now available on Google Cloud,” Emsley said. “This gives customers additional choice.”
In addition. PowerProtect Cloud Snapshot Manager is now being made available together with PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition.
“This improves our support of snapshot environments,” Emsley said. “Integrating Cloud Snapshot Manager with Power Protect DDVE lets customers store snapshots in AWS in deduplicated fashion. It’s more efficient for long term retention to store in DDVE rather than in EC2.”
