Quantum Corp. this week will announce an expansion of its disk-based backup appliance family with more capacity and management features, officials said.
The new DX100 is designed primarily for high-speed cache-to-tape libraries. With the Milpitas, Calif., companys background in tape systems, “we get a lot more credibility going in there to talk about backup and data protection than an [EMC Corp.] or [Network Appliance Inc.],” said David Kenyon, product line manager.
The DX100, to be unveiled at the NetWorld+Interop trade show in Las Vegas, scales to 50 terabytes, using 2-to-1 compression software borrowed from Quantums tape library products. The DX100 can transfer data at about 500MB per second and can emulate up to 20 tape drives with 1,000 cartridges, Kenyon said.
The DX100 will ship in September for about $10 per gigabyte, Kenyon said. The DX100s predecessor, the DX30, will continue to be sold but with a capacity of 12.4 terabytes, compared with just 3.8 terabytes now, he added. Its current price of $14 per gigabyte will be reduced to about $12, he said.
The DX series this fall will get Serial ATA drives from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc., of San Jose, Calif., but the DX100 will ship with parallel drives if serial models arent ready by September, Kenyon said. SNMP, which enables device administration by popular consoles such as Computer Associates International Inc.s Unicenter or Hewlett-Packard Co.s OpenView, is also planned, he said.
“We will be interoperable on release with all the major guys” in backup software, such as Veritas Software Corp. and Legato Systems Inc., he added. Support for iSCSI is being considered, but there are no definite plans yet, he said.
Industry analyst Robert Amatruda, of International Data Corp., said Quantums tiered approach is a better one for many entry-level and midrange customers than traditional disk vendors tack. “Its a little bit different implementation,” said Amatruda, in Framingham, Mass. “Quantum, having a very strong heritage in data protection with removable media, is in a really good position.”
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