WysDM Software will unveil its latest data protection management (DPM) offerings at next week’s Storage Networking World conference in Orlando, Fla.
The startup, which already boasts an OEM deal with EMC, will add to its diagnostic and predictive offerings with WysDM for Backups 3.0 and WysDM for Fileservers 3.0.
“Reporting is not enough,” said WysDM CEO Alan Atkinson. “Our competitors offer outdated platforms that can only report if a backup was completed or not, but DPM goes much further than that, understanding business policies as well as additional technical constraints to ensure that a business’ data is truly protected. … No other DPM product comes close to matching WysDM’s capabilities.”
Dianne McAdam, senior analyst and partner at Data Mobility Group, said other vendors look at backup logs from different vendors and consolidate that information into a single view.
“What WysDM is doing is looking not just at the backup application and media server talking to disk or tape drives, but looking at other things such as bandwidth utilization to determine where a backup problem resides,” McAdam said. “Is it a failure of the backup software, or is the network just too busy so the backup is taking longer than usual. That is the difference. They look at several parts of the backup infrastructure to determine where the problem is, or they monitor the activity to determine when problems will occur if the current increases in processing will continue.”
That approach has so far earned the self-funded startup a deal with industry giant EMC, 25 customers and a half-dozen channel partners, said Atkinson, who calls the EMC deal “a real turning point for our company.”
WysDM for Backups provides a global view to understand even the largest and most complex backup environments, the company says. The platform obtains data from the major components of the network environment, including servers, storage and applications, and then generates reports on all aspects of backup operations, from service level agreements to regulatory compliance and per-device performance.
WysDM continually monitors the environment for faulty configurations, inefficiencies and anomalies, issuing alerts before those conditions can cause backup failure. The platform’s analytic monitoring helps capacity planning, optimizes the backup environment and ensures compliance by utilizing policies for retention periods and backup schedules.
WysDM for Backups 3.0 also integrates with major backup applications such as EMC/Legato NetWorker, HP DataProtector, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, Symantec Veritas BackupExec, Symantec Veritas NetBackup, NetApp’s SnapVault and Oracle’s Recovery Manager. The platform also tracks open files that have not been backed up.
WysDM for Fileservers 3.0 offers visibility into complex fileserving environments, obtaining information from all NetApp filers and NearStores to provide reports on all aspects of fileserver operation, from hardware configuration to per-process performance, keeping detailed logs of key configuration parameters and tracking all changes. Users can compare configurations between fileservers and flag differences to guard against potential failures, and the platform also helps maximize capacity utilization.
WysDM for Backups 3.0 starts at $15,000 for 50 clients, and WysDM for Fileservers starts at $8,500.