Friday Dell announced that they were to acquire backup vendor AppAssure, more information for the Acquasition can be found here >> http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/direct2dell/b/direct2dell/archive/2012/02/24/dell-acquires-appassure.aspx
In the announcement above Dell gave some clues to their intentions for AppAssure with tight integration with the Dell storage portfolio to further assist with the fluid data vision.
Dell will extend the benefit of AppAssure across our enterprise solutions and services portfolio. Initially, it will be a software-only solution, and then over time we will offer additional data protection solutions tightly integrated in our Fluid Data architecture as we’ve done with our other acquired IP, including EqualLogic, Compellent and the Fluid File System. Customers will be able to manage data end-to-end, not in silos of servers and storage, or islands of sites.
Other than a base understanding of the AppAssure product I haven’t got any previous experience with using the product so I will leave those thoughts for another day, but you can see why Dell would want to have a backup product in the fold, the likes of HP, EMC and NetApp are all able to offer a backup product with their storage solutions and quite commonly I am asked what is the best way to backup VM’s from a replica or snapshot which isn’t easily done without a third party product at present.
However Dell have always been pretty good with their relationship with backup vendors particularly Symantec and increasingly Commvault, personally if it was Commvault that had been acquired I wouldn’t have been surprised at all.
My personal hope is that with the acquisition of AppAssure it doesn’t cause Dell to put their guard up against other backup vendors on the market, as a hardware vendor I believe it is important for them to be able to maintain the flexibility to allow end users to use their choice of backup products. I look forward into seeing how AppAssure is integrated into the storage family and also personally learning what AppAssure has to offer.
Virtualised Reality 