EMC rolls out MozyPro for Mac

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EMC’s Mozy online backup has added a new Mac edition of MozyPro to its product line.

The MozyPro for Mac product, which will be available immediately, adds centralized management features for Mac servers and workstations, including the creation of groups of clients and policies that control their backups. Management in MozyPro is “very fine-tuned,” according to Steve Fairbanks, director of product management for Mozy. “You can adjust backup sets and include or exclude file extention types according to policy.” Customers an also receive reports on backup job success rates, have alerts on failures sent to an administrator, assing backup quotas and administer roles with the new software. MozyPro for Mac will also be manageable through existing MozyPro for Windows management consoles for those who have a mix of Mac and PCs in their environment, Fairbanks said.

Both the Home and Pro editions have specific features to support Mac, including:

• Support of resource forks, alias and packages
• Spotlight Integration
• Native Cocoa Framework - Graphics are all native
• Mac Help System
• Menu Bar integration
• Native Apple Installer and installation process
• Mac-specific backup sets

One customer who’s been waiting for this rollout for quite some time is Walter Petruska, information security officer for the University of San Francisco. The University has MozyHome for Mac rolled out to some individual faculty and staff members, and the central IT department has been beta testing MozyPro for Mac for months. The plan is to roll MozyPro for Mac out to workstations used by the University’s distributed IT staff “so they can get a feel for Mozy from the client side,” Petruska said. However, the full rollout to all University servers and workstations will wait until there’s a MozyEnterprise edition for Mac.

EMC was coy when it came to whether or not there will be a MozyEnterprise for Mac, saying that MozyPro will meet most customers’ needs. But the MozyEnterprise edition that’s out now for PCs allows for more advanced management tasks like silent installs, deployment without software keys, and Active Directory and LDAP support fo security. Otherwise, Fairbanks said, “there’s very little difference” between MozyPro and MozyEnterprise.

To Petruska, however, the differences are significant. “We’re waiting to make the leap to a new backup paradigm across the University until things align and we can manage all PCs and Macs as well as servers from one console with LDAP and Active Directory integration,” he said.

Right now, workgroups and departments at the university have separate backup plans, and most of those backups remain on-campus in San Francisco, which is prone to earthquakes. Petruska said he’s looking forward to “getting everyone on the same sheet of music” and sending all backups offsite to the cloud. Most of the Mac users on campus today use EMC’s Retrospect software for local backups, but Petruska said MozyEnterprise for Mac would replace them.

Meanwhile, EMC says no edition of Mozy will replace Retrospect in its product line. Rather, according to a Mozy spokesperson, Mozy and Retrospect will be integrated going forward in packages like the one announced with Iomega’s external hard drives in July.