The world of backup reporting is getting larger with the latest releases of software from WysDM and EMC.

WysDM introduced WysDM for Disk last week and EMC, which OEMs WysDM, unveiled the latest enhancements to its package EMC Backup Advisor at Storage Networking World in Dallas this week.

WysDM for Disk expands WysDM’s backup reporting to NetApp NearStore Virtual Tape Libraries, the EMC Disk Library 3.1, Sun StorageTek StreamLine tape libraries and EMC disk arrays. (The EMC support is via EMC’s ControlCenter and is an optional item.)

The company also filled out its backup and data protection with support for Commvault Galaxy, CA BrightStor ARCserve and Symantec Pure Disk, and for the enhancements EMC has made to NetWorker 7.4. It also supports the newest versions of Tivoli Storage Manager and Symantec Veritas NetBackup.

Also adding on to its capability is support for shared memory and interprocess communications information and network interface configuration enhancements, as well as data gathering from IP switches.

WysDM’s WysDM for Backups now supplies tape drive mapping information and correlates tape drive information from the operating system device to information from the tape library. It can identify which device on a host maps to which physical drive in a tape library in a shared storage-area network environment.

Users of WysDM can now define data protection policies according to groups or nodes and use existing recovery time objective, recovery point objective and service level agreements to define new policies.

Performance has also been enhanced in getting summaries of backup jobs. With previous versions of WysDM, it took 60 seconds to run a summary. The present version takes 10 seconds. SLA summaries have also been speeded up – previous versions took 725 seconds to compile and run; the present version takes 10 seconds.

Further, IT can now enable authentication and encryption for all communications of WysDM and can compile and run an Audit Trail Report of their operations.

WysDM for disk is priced at $7,500 per array.

Since EMC’s Backup Advisor v3.0 is an OEM’ed version of WysDM’s software, many of the enhancements are the same. EMC is announcing support for CA, Symantec, Commvault, NetApp, Windows Vista and 64-bit Linux. The company has also enhanced its support for NetWorker by adding alerts and reporting for staging and cloning activities and the ability to restore reports to measure service levels. EMC Backup Advisor also includes a disk utilization metric report for the EMC Disk Library. Backup Advisor 3.0 is expected to be available in December.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.