@Dell EMC has announced updates to their Integrated #DataProtection Appliance ( #IDPA ), touting simpler management and monitoring, increased cloud-readiness with cloud disaster recovery and improved data protection for @VMware workloads. Released roughly a year ago, IDPA is a purpose-built, pre-integrated and turnkey appliance that converges protection storage, software, search and analytics in a single appliance and features cloud tiering for long-term retention.  This new release is highlighted by a new IDPA System Manager user interface, which streamlines and centralizes monitoring and management via its easy-to-use intuitive navigation and customizable dashboard. The IDPA System Manager is designed to modernize infrastructure and to simplify backups and automate tasks, such as monitoring, managing, and reporting. The new updates to IDPA also introduce Cloud Disaster Recovery add-on feature, which allows users to copy virtual machine images protected on IDPA to object storage within Amazon Web Services. Dell EMC indicates that this will help to create a modern, cloud-based and cost-efficient disaster recovery solution. In addition: Disaster recovery (DR) testing, DR fail-over and failback to/from the cloud can now be orchestrated and automated in a disaster scenario. No data protection infrastructure is needed for the failover/recovery within AWS, and no compute resources are needed until a failover occurs, greatly reducing costs. With Cloud Disaster Recovery, IDPA enables customers to leverage cloud across diverse cloud use-cases and benefit from the cloud economics and efficiencies for data protection with minimal additional learning or operational costs. Dell also mentions other IDPA features such as VM file-level recovery to allow users to recover multiple files, single files or folders, and other operational improvements that help move IDPA towards enhanced simplicity, ease of use and powerful data protection.
