Quantum Takes on Deduplication Cost and Complexity with Midrange DXi6500
Deduplication contributes to expedited backups and recoveries, high backup and recovery success rates and frees up IT staff time associated with managing these tasks. Yet in the face of these benefits that deduplication offers, many midsize organizations still continue to use other technology as their backup target, citing cost and complexity as their primary reasons for not adopting deduplication. It is these specific obstacles that the new DXi6500 family from Quantum seeks to overcome.
The exact percentage of organizations that have adopted deduplication vary but is for the most part still relatively low. A recent Computerworld article cites Gartner as saying that only about 30% of organizations have adopted deduplication in any form. Another more recent survey of 403 IT professionals that was conducted by Quantum found that only 22% of those organizations surveyed use deduplication.
What is of note is that in both the Computerworld article and the Quantum survey identify: (1) the upfront costs of deduplication; (2) confusion about how to implement it; and, (3) the complexity associated with managing it as reasons organizations have not yet deployed it.
These reasons for delaying on the deployment of a deduplication solution are certainly understandable in light of how current deduplicating solutions are configured. They can require organizations to make decisions about a number of factors including:
To try to help midsize organizations overcome the obstacles that they are encountering bringing deduplication into their environments, Quantum has introduced the new DXi6500 family of deduplicating appliances. Positioned between its DXi3500 and DXi7500 disk solutions, the DXi6500 family is designed to reduce the amount of time that these size organizations spend on evaluating and making decisions about deduplicating appliances and to help keep costs low.
The DXi6500 family provides a NAS interface for each of its five (5) models, which should make them simple to install in the LANs of midsize corporations. Each model is preconfigured and integrates with leading backup software solutions (Symantec NetBackup, CommVault Simpana, etc.) so users don't have to change the backup systems they are using now. For tape support, two of the models provide a fully integrated path to tape that bypasses the media server in specific backup software environments (Symantec NetBackup with OST).
Not only is the MSRP of the DXi6500 appliances lower than competitive hardware systems, each model also includes all the software licenses needed in the base price. So there's no extra charge for deduplication, replication, or support for the Symantec OpenStorage (OST) API. The products even include backup software specifically tailored for VMware that gives users a cost-effective and easy mechanism to protect their virtual environments.
Deploying the systems is straightforward since they are installable by the user or a VAR and scaling does not require a service call. The first two models will be available next month with an entry point of $64,000 (MSRP) while the DXi6530, DXi6540 and DXi6550 are scheduled for general availability in Q1 of 2010.
While all of the models share the aforementioned features, there are some differences between each model that are fairly intuitive to understand. For example:
By making all of the features that midsize organizations want in a deduplication solution available on all of their models, these organizations do not need to agonize over features that probably should be there in the first place. The only information they need in order to make a decision about the DXi6500 are some routine capacity and performance sizing data. Once they have this information in hand, the decision about which of these new Quantum models to select becomes self-evident without becoming either costly or complex.
The exact percentage of organizations that have adopted deduplication vary but is for the most part still relatively low. A recent Computerworld article cites Gartner as saying that only about 30% of organizations have adopted deduplication in any form. Another more recent survey of 403 IT professionals that was conducted by Quantum found that only 22% of those organizations surveyed use deduplication.
What is of note is that in both the Computerworld article and the Quantum survey identify: (1) the upfront costs of deduplication; (2) confusion about how to implement it; and, (3) the complexity associated with managing it as reasons organizations have not yet deployed it.
These reasons for delaying on the deployment of a deduplication solution are certainly understandable in light of how current deduplicating solutions are configured. They can require organizations to make decisions about a number of factors including:
- What kind of interface to select - file system (NAS) or virtual tape library (VTL)
- Whether or not to buy replication software
- How well the system interoperates with backup software
- How to integrate tape with the system for long term retention
- How deduplication works with VMware servers
To try to help midsize organizations overcome the obstacles that they are encountering bringing deduplication into their environments, Quantum has introduced the new DXi6500 family of deduplicating appliances. Positioned between its DXi3500 and DXi7500 disk solutions, the DXi6500 family is designed to reduce the amount of time that these size organizations spend on evaluating and making decisions about deduplicating appliances and to help keep costs low.
The DXi6500 family provides a NAS interface for each of its five (5) models, which should make them simple to install in the LANs of midsize corporations. Each model is preconfigured and integrates with leading backup software solutions (Symantec NetBackup, CommVault Simpana, etc.) so users don't have to change the backup systems they are using now. For tape support, two of the models provide a fully integrated path to tape that bypasses the media server in specific backup software environments (Symantec NetBackup with OST).
Not only is the MSRP of the DXi6500 appliances lower than competitive hardware systems, each model also includes all the software licenses needed in the base price. So there's no extra charge for deduplication, replication, or support for the Symantec OpenStorage (OST) API. The products even include backup software specifically tailored for VMware that gives users a cost-effective and easy mechanism to protect their virtual environments.
Deploying the systems is straightforward since they are installable by the user or a VAR and scaling does not require a service call. The first two models will be available next month with an entry point of $64,000 (MSRP) while the DXi6530, DXi6540 and DXi6550 are scheduled for general availability in Q1 of 2010.
While all of the models share the aforementioned features, there are some differences between each model that are fairly intuitive to understand. For example:
- DXi6510. This model is configured as an entry-level model so it only supports 8 TBs of usable capacity and two (2) 1 Gb Ethernet.
- DXi6520. This model can start out at 8TBs, but the hardware is pre-configured to support larger capacity and it has 6 GbE ports, allowing it to easily scale up to 32 TBs in 8TB increments.
- DXi6530. This model starts out with 24 TBs in usable capacity and is the first model in the DXi6500 series to overlap with the low end of the DXi7500 series by scaling to support 56 TBs.
- DXi6540. This model is similar to the DXi6530 in capacity but it adds two (2) 8 Gb FC ports for direct path to tape support.
- DXi6550. This model includes all of the features found in the DXi6530 and DXi6540 but adds two (2) 10 Gb Ethernet ports.
By making all of the features that midsize organizations want in a deduplication solution available on all of their models, these organizations do not need to agonize over features that probably should be there in the first place. The only information they need in order to make a decision about the DXi6500 are some routine capacity and performance sizing data. Once they have this information in hand, the decision about which of these new Quantum models to select becomes self-evident without becoming either costly or complex.
Jerome, Do you have any price-performance specifics and comparisons between the DXI6500 family and similar Data Domain products?
Sourcetek Systems is a reseller of the Quantum product line. We recently sold this solution to a Government Organization, MITRE Corp. They are very please with this option and have mentioned this fits well under the DXi7500 solution.