From the EMMY’s to the Grammy’s to the impending grand-daddy of them all, the Oscars, we are truly in the mist of award season. And Quantum is in the awards as well!
We just learned that the DXi6500 was named one of the Products of the Year for 2010 by Storage Magazine-SearchStorage.com in the Backup Hardware category. Winning an award in Storage Magazine’s 2010 Product of the Year honors race is especially nice for the DXi6500. The award announcement for 2010 backup hardware singled it out as “a major leap forward for Quantum” with a combination of “competitive performance” and “unique features.” It’s also worth noting the DXi6500 stands alone as a mid-range product to be recognized in the backup hardware category.
What’s really powerful is that the DXi6500 achieved these honors based on the operating software that it launched with. Just a couple of weeks ago we announced that the product will be one of the first to be ported to Quantum’s DXi 2.0 software—that change will effectively double the performance for the appliance and make it an even bigger bargain.
The award is also a good opportunity to talk about the place of appliances in deduplication, since there are more and more options available for users to deploy this technology—and there are an increasing number of end users who install deduplication appliances after having tried, and failed, to implement it successfully in their backup software.
The real issue is that deduplication is a fairly compute-intensive operation, and the operational load has to occur somewhere.
It would be nice if you could just check a box in the backup software and have it all work, but the reality is that if you take existing backup software and servers and ask them to do add another heavy application, the load increases substantially and everything else slows down. I suppose this is a variation on the “there’s no free lunch” theme. That is not to say that deduplicating on existing systems, or building up specialized configurations of servers and storage specifically to carry out deduplication, is always a bad idea. For certain end users, it can make lots of sense.
But putting deduplication on a purpose-built appliance simplifies the process, and for most users means the lowest total cost by far, the lowest overhead implementation, and the highest performance. The DXi is a great example. Most of the appliances in the family use a hardware design that was created specifically for deduplication—they even include internal tiered storage that uses a small amount of very high speed disk (either SSDs or fast SAS drives) to handle the deduplication indexing functions so a large number of operations is accelerated. And now, with the DXi 2.0 software, we have operating software specifically designed for that hardware as well. The result is faster performance both for single operations and for concurrent operations—in an appliance that a user can just drop into an existing system and use with almost any backup software.
The benefit is clear—it’s taking one of the products named to the Products of the Year and making it twice as powerful.
