News

posted on 16 May 2008 10:04

Quantum has finally announced the availability of its high-end DXi7500 deduping disk-to-disk backup product, eleven months after first announcing it and four days after Data Domain has announced its high-end DD690 deduplicating product.

As expected the DXi7500 is a mid-size/enterprise data center system with a 240TB raw storage capacity. It can be fed by smaller DXi3500 and DXi5500 machines in remote and branch offices which dedupe data before replicating it to the larger system. This dedupes the data again permitting a second bite at the data reduction cherry.

Again, as expected from the original June '07 announcement, the DXi7500 has an adaptive deduplication feature with policies being used to switch deduplication from inline execution at data ingest time to post-ingest execution if the data ingest rate falls and prolongs the backup window. This is a unique feature.

The system can present itself as a NAS (network-attached storage) store, using either NFS or CIFS protocols, or as a virtual tape library (VTL). It can export data direct to physical tape and is fully qualified with Symantec's NetBackup 6.5 Direct to Tape product. In NAS and VTL mode there is no de-duplication. NAS and VTL can be presented simultaneously through partitioning.

Quantum says that the DXi7500's throughput is up to 4TB/hour compressed (8TB raw). It has a high-availability architecture to prevent there being any single point of failure.

The Data Domain DD690 is a much bigger machine, with a raw capacity of 768TB and full array throughput of 22.4TB/hour. It carries out inline deduplication and uses two quad-core Xeons to do so. It cannot export data directly to tape though.

There is a suggestion that the DXi7500, with its dual PowerPC CPU setup, does not have such powerful processing capabilities as the DD690 and that is why there is the option of switching to a post-process deduplication time. Quantum describes the DXi7500 as the industry's first deduplication product designed to match specific backup needs.

Quantum has also announced  a new consulting service, the StorageCare Game Plan.

EMC is expected to announce deduplicating products next week that use Quantum deduplication software technology. These may well compete with the DXi range.

Quantum believes that it is still very early days in the deduplication market and, that with its edge-to-core DXi range and second-generation DXi7500 with its unique adaptive deduplication feature, it is very well positioned to take advantage of customers' moves to add deduplication to their data protection strategies.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}