Quantum Storage Appliance Offers Enterprise Performance To Mid-Range Market

Storage vendor Quantum Corp. has added to its line of deduplication and replication appliances with a model targeted at mid-range customers who want high performance in their Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) environments. The DXi6700 is a follow-up to the previously announced DXi6500 model appliance designed for network-attached storage (NAS) environments. While the 6700 saves data to storage disks or to legacy tape storage, the virtual tape library (VTL) user interface emulates a tape storage environment.

At a list price starting at $159,000, the 6700 offers backup speeds of 3.5TB per second and total system capacity of up to 56TB. That is a good price for that level of performance, said Jeff Boles, senior analyst with The Taneja Group, a research firm.

"You can address a lot of backup environment requirements with that kind of throughput," Boles said. "That's testimony to the fact that this is an enterprise scale system at a real inexpensive price point."

While the appliance comes with all necessary software licenses included, it also integrates with five brands of third-party backup software that data centers may already use to manage storage: NetBackup and Backup Exec, both from Symantec; Networker, from EMC; Oracle Secure Backup, from Oracle; and Time Navigator, from Atempo.  "The backup software kicks off the process. They tell us when to start sending data," the company says. "We're moving the data, but they're keeping track of the whole process."

The 6700 introduction also follows on the release in April of the DXi4500 appliance, priced and sized for small-to-medium size business (SMB) and remote-office backup environments. The 6700 is designed for simplicity and to be easy to deploy, manage and expand. Like all DXi appliances, the new model includes Quantum Advanced Reporting tools that provide an internal view of appliance operations for doing trend analysis. It also monitors CPU activity, input/output speeds to disk storage, capacity utilization and other metrics.Quantum compared the performance of the DXi6700 to EMC's new Data Domain 670, which has the same 56TB capacity of the DXi6700, but offers slightly faster throughput of 3.6TB per second, based a comparison of the published specs for the EMC product. However, the 670 is 55 percent more expensive than the DXi6700 with a starting price of $284,000.

Quantum also did side-by-side performance testing with the previous generation DD660 and reports that the Quantum model delivers 20 percent faster backups and 35 percent faster data restores at a 45 percent lower cost than the EMC model.

Boles did not have specific market share figures at hand, but said EMC is the sales leader of data deduplication and replication appliances with a VTL interface, along with Quantum and FalconStor, among others. EMC's products are usually sold at a price premium to the rest of the market, he explains, so Quantum's offerings can be very competitive at lower prices.