Dell Attacks Data Domain, HP and Quantum in De-Dupe

To help customers better manage and reduce the cost of backing up and recovering company data, Dell Inc. unveiled its next generation disk backup appliance built on the Fluid Data architecture.

The new high performance Dell DR4100 disk backup appliance can help customers reduce the amount of necessary backup storage capacity – by up to 15 times – with Dell’s built-in data deduplication and compression technologies. Latest advancements in the backup appliance offer customers expansion shelves for improved storage capacity, increased ‘many-to-one’ replication capabilities for improved disaster recovery, and additional backup software certifications for enhanced interoperability.

"Companies of all sizes are tasked with managing the persistent growth of data, and they often struggle with cost-efficiently and effectively handling data backup and recovery," said Alan Atkinson, VP and GM, Dell Storage. "For those looking to augment or replace traditional tape environments with the speed and reliability of a disk-based solution, the Dell DR4100 simplifies backup and recovery while optimising storage resources. The addition of expansion shelves, combined with our advanced data deduplication and compression technologies, offers customers a simple, affordable and scalable way to manage data protection."
    
The easy to deploy and manage DR4100, based on the PowerEdge 12th generation servers, is a disk backup target appliance with built-in deduplication and compression technology designed to significantly reduce the amount of storage required. Benefiting from Dell’s acquired Ocarina data reduction algorithms, customers can eliminate redundant copies of data and decrease disk capacity requirements by up to 93%. The appliance performs all data reduction operations, removing this function from the customer’s application and backup servers and eliminating any impact on backup and recovery performance.

The appliance can reduce or eliminate the dependence on managing tape backups while enabling customers to maintain their backup data on disk longer, enabling fast and reliable restores when needed.

Additional Dell DR4100 capabilities and benefits include:

• Scalable Capacity – Offers customers the ability to add up to two expansion shelves (9,18 or 27TB each), providing scalability and larger capacity than competing platforms. [Based on February 2013 internal Dell testing, comparing Dell DR4100 to EMC Data Domain DD160 and DD600 Series, Quantum DXi67 and DXi4000 Series, and HP StoreOnce 4200 Series.] Customers can scale their solution from 2.7TB to 81TB of usable capacity – or up to 1.2PB of logical capacity – as their business and data backup demands grow.
• Improved Disaster Recovery – Fast, daily, deduplicated replication of backup data can be performed using many-to-one replication that supports up to 32 nodes in different locations replicating to one central node. This can reduce the burden on IT staff backing-up many sites by providing a simple disaster recovery solution that can help reduce capital and operational costs associated with it, while minimising backup storage needs at remote offices.
• Broader Backup Software Certifications – Designed to work with a vast array of backup software applications, the DR4100 supports vendors including Dell (AppAssure and Quest), Symantec, CommVault, Oracle and CA.

The DR4100 can be deployed in five initial usable capacity configurations ranging from 2.7 to 27TB. With its deduplication and compression technology, it allows logical capacities at up to 15 times usable capacity. The appliance also features an all-inclusive software licensing model that can reduce storage costs over time by offering premium features, such as replication, DR Rapid Data Access and future functionalities, at no additional cost.  

"The Dell DR4000 has increased our backup performance while the data deduplication technology has reduced our backup storage footprint, allowing us to cost-effectively retain backups for lengthy periods of time," said Darryl Glass, hosting manager at South Africa-based First Technology. "With the availability of the Dell DR4100 and the all-inclusive licensing model, we have the option to upgrade our software at no additional cost and add expansion shelves to easily add capacity as we need it."

The DR4100 will be available through Dell and its channel partners worldwide this March 2013.