Tape drive and automation vendor Quantum Corp. of San Jose, Calif., is bringing out a DXi 6900 appliance with new software, more capacity than before
It isn’t often that a vendor makes a product it says can take on four of a competitor’s models, but that is what Quantum Corp. is doing with its new DXi6900 deduplication appliance.
The company said Monday the appliance compares and sometimes betters EMC’s Data Domain 4200, 4500, 7200 and 990 on several measures.
“When you look at usable capacity, performance and the feature set and price we feel with this product we can go toe-to-toe with any of these,” Eric Bassier, Qunatum’s director of product marketing, said in an interview.
For example, at the low end the DXi6900 has less initial capacity than the DD4200 (17 TB vs 36 TB), but scales higher (up to 510 TB compared to 180 TB), for less money (Quantum says its appliances costs between US$88,000 and $1.5 million, while it says the DD4200 lists at US$166,000 to $666,000.
At the high end, the ECM DD990 scales up to 576 TB, which is 66 TB more than the DXi 6900. But Quantum says the list price of the top capacity EMC unit is US$2,475,000, whereas the top DXi model is US$1.5 million.
The DXi6900 “as an enterprise dedupe appliance is going to be really disruptive in the market,” Bassier said.
He said the appliance has two advantages, he said: It uses 4 TB spinning disks for capacity, and the company’s recently-released StorNext 5 file system for better performance than previous software. It leverages Quantum’s variable length deduplication technology, which the company says provides three times disc saving efficiencies compared to fixed block dedupe used by other companies.
Quantum is also trimming its dedupe lineup, making the DXi6900 the top model for mid- to large enterprises, followed by the DXi 4700 for smaller organizations and branch offices and the DXi V-series for virtual environments.
Production of the DXi8500 and 6700 will soon be stopped. The DXi6800 will stay in the lineup and it and the 4700 will soon get the StorNext 5 software.
In Canada the DXi series is sold through system integrators including CDN Top 100 Solution Providers Tera Mach Technologies, Scalar Decisions Inc., Mainland Information Systems and Major Technologies.
“We think our customers and partners are really going to value out simplified portfolio, massive scalability, good performance, and enterprise class feature set,” Bassier said.
The DXi6900 comes in a 32U chassis with 15 racks of capacity which can be turned on as needed. A base model starts with up to 34 TB capacity, with a minimum of 17 TB. Customers can turn on capacity in 17 TB chunks by buying licence keys.
Quantum also sells a service called Q-Cloud Protect for backing up data in its cloud.
