The Quantum DXi7500 Enterprise Disk Backup System Available

Quantum Corp. announced general availability of the DXi7500 enterprise disk backup system which serves as the anchor for a comprehensive data protection strategy. Together with Quantum’s DXi3500 and DXi5500 disk backup appliances, the DXi-Series provides customers with the most adaptable, easily managed and scalable family of disk solutions leveraging de-duplication and replication available today. Designed to meet the requirements of large midrange and enterprise data centers, the DXi7500 delivers scalable performance and capacity, enterprise-class availability, configuration flexibility and integrated direct tape creation functionality. In addition, it offers a choice of de-duplication approaches based on user-defined policies, which is a first in the industry.

  Quantum DXi7500

According to the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Research Report Data Protection Market Trends (Jan. 2008), the most common data protection challenges for enterprise customers include: the need to reduce backup and recovery times; the cost of storage systems; keeping pace with capacity of data to protect; backup and recovery reliability; and managing/locating data across backups. At the same time, many of these same customers face similar challenges on a different scale within their regional offices and remote sites.

This announcement furthers Quantum’s leadership in delivering the broadest portfolio of integrated disk and tape solutions to address these challenges. Linking these platforms through a unified management system, comprehensive security framework, and global service and support infrastructure enables customers to cost-effectively implement an enterprise-wide data protection, retention and disaster recovery strategy with confidence.

"Not all data is alike and therefore has different backup, retention and de-duplication requirements," said Heidi Biggar, analyst for ESG. "Quantum’s DXi7500 gives organizations the flexibility to match a de-duplication process to meet varying enterprise requirements. It also allows users to apply de-duplication across their entire environment (e.g., remote locations) before any backup data is trafficked over the WAN. Doing de-duplication in this fashion provides even more efficiencies within IT environments and is something organizations should look into, if they haven’t already."

Policy-based De-duplication: Customers Can Choose Method that Best Meets Their Needs
Data de-duplication dramatically increases the role that disk plays in the protection of critical data, and the DXi7500 delivers a unique step forward with the industry’s first policy-based de-duplication approach. Competitive offerings lock customers into a single de-duplication process which often doesn’t match their backup requirements or support the varied applications they wish to protect. In contrast, Quantum’s policy-based approach gives customers the flexibility to determine the most appropriate de-duplication process for each job to best meet their disk capacity or backup/recovery window requirements:

• The adaptive de-duplication mode optimizes performance and efficient disk utilization by automatically adjusting the de-duplication process based on the data ingest rate.
• The fully deferred/post-process mode offers the shortest backup window and fastest restore while decreasing disk capacity needed for backup.
• The native NAS/VTL mode delivers the fastest possible performance by offering conventional disk backup without de-duplication.

DXi7500 Scales across the Enterprise
With highly scalable capacity of 18 to 180 TB (up to 240 TB raw capacity) and performance of up to 4 TB/hour compressed, the DXi7500 provides disk backup capabilities to match the needs of the most demanding enterprise environments. The system can be presented to the backup software as a NAS mount point (CIFS/NFS), as a VTL with 4 Gbit Fibre Channel connectivity, or across all configurations simultaneously by partition or share, providing industry-leading flexibility for IT managers juggling multiple operating systems and networks in heterogeneous enterprise environments. The DXi7500 also offers customers enterprise-class features including direct tape creation for compliance and archive. The DXi7500 is fully qualified with Symantec NetBackup 6.5 Direct to Tape, allowing seamless management of the tape creation process.

The DXi architecture checks and compares blocks across the DXi family prior to sending only those that are truly unique, enabling customers to implement a global de-duplication and replication strategy that minimizes required WAN bandwidth across every site. And just like all of Quantum’s backup, recovery and archive solutions, the DXi-Series employs a suite of common management tools linked to a unified global service and support infrastructure to allow single window management as well as efficient diagnosis and time to resolution should an issue arise.

"The availability of Quantum’s DXi7500 marks the first scalable solution integrating data de-duplication, multi-site replication, tape creation and common management anchoring an end-to-end enterprise strategy," said Janae Lee, vice president, corporate and product marketing for Quantum. "Customers understand that enterprise-wide data protection cannot be met with a point product, but rather with a set of technologies and approaches that are tightly integrated and deliver real ROI benefit. Today Quantum is delivering a complete portfolio backed by consultative services based on years of focused data protection expertise."

As an important addition to Quantum’s StorageCare service portfolio, the company has also introduced a suite of consulting services. StorageCare Game Plan, initially available with the purchase of any DXi7500 system, aids customers in architecting next generation data protection solutions. This value-added service offering assists customers, for example, with combining and optimizing disk and tape system utilization and maximizing data de-duplication and multi-site replication efficiencies.

For more information on the DXi7500