Quantum DXi7500 Excels at Enterprise Disk-Based Backup

The DXi7500, Quantum’s flagship disk-based backup and data deduplication solution, offers a robust feature set and high-quality construction and architecture for the enterprise disk backup market.

With solid throughput and deduplication performance, the DXi7500 can serve as the centerpiece of an enterprise's VTL (virtual tape library)- or NAS (network-attached storage)-based disk backup infrastructure. What's more, the product's management platform, Quantum Vision and StorageCare Guardian, allows administration of many DXi-Series boxes, including support for replicating deduped backups across WAN links—a valuable service in any disaster recovery and business continuity plan.

Check out images of the Quantum DXi7500 here. 

Designed expressly for backup and archive operations, the DXi7500 offers both VTL and NAS presentations. In addition, the direct tape creation capability writes physical media over dedicated Fibre Channel links and is compatible with backup applications’ direct tape creation protocols.

Support for backup software is excellent—it’s hard to think of a backup console, OS, application and agent combination that isn’t supported. Likewise, support for a variety of tape drive and tape media emulation types is comprehensive.

For instance, organizations that have implemented complex backup and retention policies through backup software such as Symantec NetBackUp can easily remap these jobs onto the newly created VTL on the Dxi7500. This can also be done through complete support of Symantec’s OpenStorage API, which can be especially helpful when backing up multiple locations.

The heart of the DXi7500, and of all Quantum's products, is the proprietary file system, StorNext. StorNext is a shared disk file system that can be installed on disk arrays in a SAN and is compatible with many client and server operating systems. StorNext is typically used in high-performance storage environments where large files must be shared by many users.

In addition, the DXi7500’s flexibility regarding deduplication is a key differentiator. The product can function as a VTL (up to 64 libraries with 160 virtual drives) and/or a CIFS (Common Internet File System) or NFS (Network File System) NAS. Deduplication is based on per-volume policies and can take place inline (which optimizes for capacity), post-processed (which optimizes for performance), both or neither.

The available combinations of inline and post processing deduplication methods can allow administrators to optimize storage environments to meet the needs of their applications, data and backup/retention policies.

The system, which is designed for use in an enterprise data center, ships as a single full-size four-post rack in its base configuration of 24TB (raw capacity) and scales up in 12TB chunks to a whopping 240TB in two full racks.

Typically, each unit arrives preconfigured with a head or node that is basically a fault-tolerant server running the DXi software and equipped with dual array modules, a 4G-bps Fibre Channel switch and a 1G-bps Ethernet switch. Each component includes hot-swappable redundant power supplies and fans.

Each single array module houses dual hot-swappable Fibre Channel system controllers (active/active) and dual RAID controllers (active/active) with battery-backed-up cache connected to 16 hot-swappable 750GB SATA (soon to be upgraded to 1TB) drives.

Drives are typically configured with a global hot spare—for RAID 5 there are three groups of 4+1 drives and for RAID 6 there is a group of 6+2 and a group of 5+2 drives. Each system can house up to four array modules, and each array module in turn connects up to four expansion modules.