Entry-Level De-Dup by Quantum

Quantum Corp. announced significant enhancements to the company’s Vision global management and reporting software and to its DXi7500 enterprise disk backup system featuring data de-duplication and replication. Quantum’s Vision software, which offers ‘single pane of glass’ administration for all Quantum disk backup and tape automation systems, has expanded its multi-unit monitoring and reporting features to help further increase the return on investment (ROI) across users’ global data protection environments. Quantum has also added a new DXi7500 model with 9 terabytes (TB) of usable capacity, extending the scalability of the company’s enterprise disk backup system and offering an entry point well suited for midrange data center environments. Together, these enhancements allow IT departments to more effectively combine disk, tape and replication in a unified strategy that boosts short-term backup and restore performance while reducing disk requirements by 90 percent or more, increases data recovery points, improves long-term compliance and disaster recovery protection, and allows users to proactively manage their backup resources from a central console.

The new Quantum Vision software tools provide detailed trend analyzes of DXi-Series performance, data de-duplication ratios, capacity utilization and replication functionality. For example, customers can easily track data reduction efficiencies over time and across DXi systems installed around the world and quickly develop reports to accurately demonstrate ROI metrics and predict future capacity needs. Additionally, IT managers can centrally monitor operational status at a glance and administer all Quantum systems through a simple, intuitive user interface.

“Quantum’s Vision software personifies the company’s depth and breadth of end-to-end solutions for backup, recovery and archive encompassing disk AND tape, and it should bring significant value to customers grappling with the challenges associated with effective management of their data protection resources,” said Brian Garrett, technical director of ESG Lab. “Having recently evaluated the new functionality of Quantum’s Vision management application, I found tools such as the de-duplication trend analysis to be an excellent example of the deep, yet intuitive value of Vision’s rich set of capabilities.”

With the new 9 TB DXi7500 entry point, Quantum delivers additional flexibility to match customers’ data retention needs and future capacity objectives. Quantum’s DXi-Series portfolio offers a continuum of disk backup solutions scaling from 1 to 180 TB of usable capacity prior to applying data reduction techniques and extends single-platform data de-duplication capabilities across remote sites, midrange offices and primary data centers. Also reflecting the tremendous flexibility Quantum provides, its policy-based data de-duplication approach gives customers the ability to select the most appropriate de-duplication process for each job based on their business, application or backup/recovery window requirements. Users can choose between adaptive de-duplication (where data is de-duplicated during ingest), fully deferred de-duplication (data is de-duplicated in a post-process) or native VTL/NAS mode (no de-duplication).

Unlike some other suppliers that currently offer different, and in many cases incompatible, de-duplication technology approaches for the SMB and the enterprise, Quantum’s DXi architecture leverages a common de-duplication technology that supports all DXi3500, DXi5500 and DXi7500 models. This unified approach means that low-cost appliances designed for small offices and distributed sites can be linked to enterprise de-duplication systems and managed, along with tape resources, from a single interface.

“Quantum’s integrated, end-to-end approach enables customers to implement a global backup strategy that combines disk, tape and replication to reduce disk needs, minimize bandwidth requirements, reduce media handling, save administration time and reduce overall data protection costs,” said Janae Lee, vice president, corporate and product marketing for Quantum. “And the Vision software is the needle that weaves Quantum systems into an even more powerful and unified solution.”

Availability and prices
Quantum Vision is available immediately to customers as a software application run on a customer-supplied Windows server. Licensing for a solution managing two Quantum disk or tape systems begins at $7,500. Quantum’s DXi7500 9 TB capacity model is also immediately available to customers at an MSRP of about $135,000 for a typical configuration.