Quantum Adds Deduplication to Disk Backup - ' What About the Competition' (
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Quantums Jackson said the benefits of disk are limited because conventional disk storage cannot provide enough cost-effective capacity to let users retain more than a few days of backup data.
Additionally, Jackson said, the amount of backup data in distributed sites and cost of bandwidth have prevented disk-based remote replication from being a viable solution, leaving data at risk in the event of a site loss or other localized threat.
"Quantums DXi3500 and DXi5500 address these issues," he said.
How will these new offerings stack up against the competition, which is quickly becoming more formidable?
"Avamar [now part of EMC] and Data Domain were pioneers in the use of de-duplication," analyst Hill said. "Diligent, NexSan and Sepaton are other key players in the use of deduplication. All have good products, but Quantum is the only company that has native tape technology as well."
Hill said this is important because although the increased use of VTLs will have an impact upon tape technology, tape will still serve a purpose, such as being a necessary emergency "spare tire."
CEO Belluzzo: Why Quantum offers a fresh alternative. Click here to read more.
"Quantum has the ability to sell an effective combined solution and to help customers smoothly transition from all tape to a mixed disk/tape environment," Hill said.
Also "Quantum already has an installed base of customers [both as Quantum and ADIC] for their tape products, and having a direct line to these customers as part of its customer database Rolodex will give it a foot in the door and a share of mind at customer sites."
Key features in Quantums DXi-Series
In addition to data de-duplication, Quantums integrated software layer includes a high performance embedded file-system, high speed data compression, asynchronous replication, interface flexibility, and built-in monitoring, alerting and diagnostic tools.
This integrated software layer not only provides a key advantage for the DXi3500 and DXi5500 appliances, but also offers an extensible foundation for future intelligent backup, recovery and archive solutions, Jackson said.
The DXi-Series provides a variety of capacity options that deliver protection for data sets ranging from 250GB to 11TB in size.
The DXi3500 and DXi5500 are integrated appliances that can be presented to backup software as a NAS mount point (CIFS/NFS) or as a VTL with either Fibre Channel or iSCSI interconnect, Jackson said.
No matter how they appear to backup software, DXi-Series appliances are fully compatible with all leading backup applications and do not require that users change their existing backup methodology or infrastructure, he added.
Availability and pricing
Quantum plans to begin shipping DXi3500 and DXi5500 units early in the first calendar quarter of 2007. Pricing begins at $24,000 for an entry DXi-Series solution and scales across eight different available models with increasing amounts of storage capacity.
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