Introduction – Dell PowerVault DL2000 User Manual
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ESG LAB VALIDATION
Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault
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Copyright
2008, The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Introduction
The Dell PowerVault DL2000 Powered by CommVault is a customer-installable, fully integrated backup to disk
appliance that offers reliable data protection with file level data deduplication and fast, drill-down recovery. With
CommVault‘s Continuous Data Replicator (CDR) agent, companies can protect their remote and branch offices
while providing continuous protection of critical servers and applications. This ESG Lab Report presents the
results of ESG Lab testing of these capabilities while also exploring integration with Microsoft applications and
protection and recovery of VMware virtual servers.
Background
If there is a common theme to be found in end-
users‘ top data protection challenges, it is that they are all
generally a result of
—and are compounded by—large and growing IT and data storage environments. In fact,
ESG recently
asked IT decision makers to identify their organization‘s current data protection challenges and, as
shown in Figure 1, respondents clearly identify a wide variety of challenges.
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Those that rose to the top of the list
included the need to reduce backup times; dealing with the cost of storage systems, which affects the ability to
keep pace with the capacity of data that needs to be protected; and the need to reduce recovery times.
FIGURE 1. TOP DATA PROTECTION CHALLENGES
ESG research has also found that end-users are solving their data protection technology and process challenges
with disk-based solutions. As a matter of fact, two-thirds (67%) of organizations surveyed now use disk-based
storage platforms at some point in the backup process, with most of these users employing a mix of disk and
tape storage in a disk-to-disk-to-tape architecture. While survey respondents forecast a significant shift in backup
capacity to external disk-based storage over the next three years, tape is not going away
—a vast majority of
early adopters report that tape is augmenting disk for long term archive and offsite data protection.
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Source: ESG Research Report, Data Protection Market Trends, 2008