Backup, at least according to EMC, is 'broken' and the company's Backup Recovery Systems (BRS) division is hoping to ride to the rescue with a 'blue print' to help resellers help customers and an array of new products, officially launched today.

Shant Soghomonian, EMC BRS APJ channel lead, says research commissioned by EMC shows 57% of companies have experienced data loss in the last 12 months, while more than three out of four IT decision makers are not confident they could fully recover from data loss.

“Backup is broken,” Soghomonian says.

He says we've ended up with a world of 'accidental architecture' created by siloed infrastructure and processes as IT administrators implement their own solutions.

“So you end up with virtualisation having its own system and processes, storage having its own... and it's creating a number of inefficiencies.”

The increasing number of developers building backup smarts into applications themselves, further exacerbates the problems, Soghomonian says.

“BRS is launching a blue print for data protection which will enable resellers to help fix customers' backup and move them away from accidental architecture and towards the services model, whether internal or external.”

Soghomonian says there is 'a really profitable opportunity' for resellers to 'make a large amount of money' through presales, installations and maintenance.

“Seventy-seven per cent of customers are not confident they can restore data – that's one of the issues they're facing today and they're looking to partners to help them solve these issues.

But the shift in data protection is not as simple as going and implementing a new backup technology.

“It's about understanding the pains they are feeling in backups, archives... what they have and where they need to go.

“So there's a lot of work in assessment and presales as well as delivery services.

He estimates a 50 to 100% services drag, depending on how much transformation the customer is needing.

As well as the overarching protection storage architecture blueprint – which Soghomonian says can also be used while selling products such as Oracle databases – EMC launched new midrange data domain systems, with the Data Domain DD2500, DD4200, DD4500 and DD7200 systems, extended backup and archive application support and data protection suite enhancements with Avamar 7 supporting all major data center workloads being directed to Data Domain systems.

EMC NetWorker 8.1 also introduces integated snapshop management, with a wizard-based user interface, auto-discovery and intelligent assignment of snapshot storage.

The company says integrations with Data Domain systems are tightened.

New cloud backup functionality has also been introduced with Mozy delivering a suite of features to make cloud backups easier to scale and manage.