When it comes to protecting data, enterprise environments face unique challenges: data volumes are large, growth is unpredictable, data is spread over multiple sites, and it’s subject to varying recovery and retention requirements. And hovering above all the problems is one of cost and efficiency—budget constraints mean acquisition costs must be controlled and each admin has to be able to manage more data.
Quantum’s new DXi8500 deduplication appliance with 2.1 software was designed to give larger environments a new set of tools for solving those challenges more effectively. To handle larger data volumes, it increased capacity to a full 320 usable TB (that’s capacity that a user really sees), and the new DXi 2.1 software provides a more streamlined, inline data flow that is faster—up to a full 8.8TB/hour. Both in performance and capacity, the new DXi8500 leads the industry for single dedupe appliances. To handle unpredictable data growth, it scales in 20TB increments from 40TB up to the maximum—so users can expand easily as data grows—and its large capacity means users can hold more backup data for longer periods at lower cost on fast-access disk.
To help users meet budget pressures, the pricing of the DXi8500 is the lowest in the industry for its class—when combined with its performance advantage it means the DXi8500 offers over twice the performance per dollar as competitive products. Ongoing costs remain low, too, because the base price includes all the software licenses that a user might need over the life of the unit—replication for multi-site protection, a direct path to tape, CIFS and NFS interfaces, and Symantec OST support. The price even includes DXI Accent software to distribute dedupe between the backup server and the DXi.
DXi Accent is worth a little more detail. It makes backup faster when the network between the backup server and the DXi is slowing it down. With DXi Accent in place, the first stage of dedupe occurs on the backup server so that only the new blocks in each backup set get moved over the network to the DXi8500. That lets network-constrained backups go faster, but at the same time it keeps the load on the server low by carrying out many of the compute-intensive functions (index look-up, replication, background integrity checking, space reclamation, etc.) on the purpose-built appliance. The result is faster backup over the network with a very light load on the backup server.
DXi Accent has several unique features among hybrid deduplication systems: it allows server-by-server deployment, can operate over a WAN to provide remote backup, and it is supported by Quantum’s direct tape creation capability, so creation of removable media can avoid the network bottleneck.
Also part of the DXi8500 release are new management features designed to keep administrators ahead of the data growth curve. A new calendar-based scheduler gives users a simpler way of controlling the timing and the bandwidth allotted to functions like replication, and there’s support for optional software that gives IT departments more effective management across multiple sites and that provides consolidated protection for physical and virtual servers. Visit Quantum.com for more information.
