Quantum Corp. on Monday announced plans for a new family of disk-based backup products that officials say will save enterprises money and save administrators time.
Also, the products will improve data integrity for end users.
The first product, called DX30, is a $45,000, three-terabyte system designed to front standard tape libraries. Its made of 30 drives housed in 2U-tall rack mounted box, and will ship in the second quarter of this year.
“All businesses need to recover after data interruption,” said Michael Brown, CEO of the Milpitas, Calif. company, best known for its tape products and low-end Snap brand of network-attached storage products.
Using actual disks in front of traditional tape systems gives the advantages of faster backup and recovery times and better data integrity, he said. The DX30 can be daisy-chained for more scalability, and its drives slide out on rails for service.
More of the product family will debut later this year, with a version of the DX30 specifically for backup tasks, and still more will come next year. Brown was more vague about next years additions, but “what you can certainly expect would be increases in capacity and performance. We also could develop other versions or other products based on the technology, depending on where the data is stored,” he said.
A strong possibility is a hierarchal storage management application, which is the concept of dynamically relocating less frequently accessed data to less expensive mediums.
John McArthur, an analyst at International Data Corp., in Framingham, Mass., also spoke at Quantums announcement.
“It doesnt replace anything. Customers are still going to use tape automation,” he said.
Also, McArthur said, “This is not a market where one size fits all. Solutions have to be tailored to the particular application customers have.” That means that theres room for Quantums product and their competitions, he said.
That competition, Brown noted, includes similar products from three other California vendors—Alacritus Software Inc., of Livermore, Network Appliance Inc., of Sunnyvale, and Nexsan Technologies Inc., of Los Angeles.
Disk storage has previously been narrowed to the very specific tasks of mirroring, replication, and snapshot functions, Brown said. Quantums professional services group will conduct any specific application integration, he said. Also, “we are exploring the OEM interest” in the DX30, said Brown.