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Quantum revealed June 20 that it has increased the capacities of several of its disk-based backup appliances, added new functionality to them and yet decreased their pricing, in an ambitious ploy to get the attention of the SMB market.
The announcement was made on the opening day of the Storage World conference in Long Beach, Calif. Forty-five data storage vendors are participating in the conference, which ends June 22.
Quantum is aiming its newly upgraded DX3000 and DX5000 disk-based backup appliances at the SMB (small and midsize business) market, a far-flung segment that analysts say is now beginning to consider purchasing faster and more scalable data storage systems.
The San Jose, Calif., storage company is trying to take advantage of this trend—as are many of its competitors—by wooing new customers with what amounts to sale-priced deals.
To meet this perceived demand for additional backup and recovery capacity within its midrange disk appliances, Quantum has increased the storage space in those two appliances by 25 percent and lowered the associated cost per gigabyte across these appliances by nearly 20 percent, a Quantum spokesperson said.
The following appliances were made available June 20:
- DX3000/iSCSI (1.5 or 3.5TB usable capacity), with or without Optyon hardware compression
- DX3000/2 GB Fibre Channel (3.0 or 7.0TB), with hardware compression
- DX5000/iSCSI (4.5 or 9.0TB), with or without hardware compression
- DX5000/2 GB Fibre Channel (9.0 or 18.0TB), with hardware compression
Quantums Optyon hardware-based compression represents an industry advancement in VTL (virtual tape library) technology, the spokesperson said.
For example, a company can purchase a DX3000 with 1.5T usable capacity (RAID 5) for a suggested list price of about $10,000, which is a reduction of about $2,000, the spokesperson said.
Quantum also enhanced the flexibility of its DX3000 and DX5000 disk appliances by including the option of choosing VTL or disk targets within the same appliance. This feature allows users to extend their backup options on a per-partition basis (up to 16 partitions), thus increasing disk capacity.
Prices are definitely becoming more competitive in this space, Dianne McAdam, director of enterprise information assurance with The Clipper Group, of Wellesley, Mass., told eWEEK in an e-mail.
“Quantum is offering more capacity at a lower price point for customers; this makes their solution even more affordable for customers,” she said.
Can Quantum execute in the SMB space against EMC, Network Appliance, Hewlett-Packard, IBM—and all the smaller vendors?
“Quantum has always executed well through its channels—and channels are a good way to sell to the SMB market,” McAdam said.
The merger with ADIC (which is focused much more on the enterprise and has a more direct sales force) gives Quantum visibility in the larger enterprise market, McAdam said, “but I would say that they have always had a presence in the SMB space. EMC has been successful in the SMB space with its partnership with Dell. HP has been marketing through its channels to the SMB space. The DX series of products has been successful product line for Quantum.”