Enhancements to Quantum DXi8500 and Scalar i6000

Quantum Corp. announced general availability of three new products aimed directly at addressing enterprise customer backup, archive and management challenges.

Enterprise environments are characterised by large, growing data volumes requiring high-capacity storage, extensive scalability, and performance from their backup and archive solutions. They also need an integrated approach to monitor and manage processes across sites and tiers of storage.

Quantum’s advancements include:

• DXi8500 with DXi 2.1 software incorporates Quantum’s latest-generation DXi software.
• Scalar i6000 tape library with dual robotics and Active Vault is optimised for storing and retrieving enterprise data sets. New features include dual robotics for high data availability, Active Vault for expanded managed capacity, and partitioning enhancements for provisioning.
• Quantum Vision 4.1 offers enhanced federated management and analytics for all Quantum disk and tape systems, including the DXi8500 and Scalar i6000.

Nearly 10,000 enterprise customers worldwide have turned to Quantum for their data protection needs, and this announcements reflect the company’s continued investment in integrated solutions and management tools aimed at large-scale, multi-site deployments.
 
DXi8500: Performance, Capacity and Value

• Inline Performance, up to 8.8 TB/hr: Utilising a purpose-built, tiered storage design, the DXi8500 is the fastest target deduplication appliance available.
• Single, Unified Deduplication Appliance: The DXi8500 now scales from 40 TB to 320 TB – a 60 percent increase in capacity.
• Price-Performance: The newly enhanced DXi8500 twice the performance of similarly priced competitive products. It provides all licenses in the base price, including deduplication, replication, direct tape creation, OST, VTL, NAS, and DXi Accent for hybrid mode deduplication.
• DXi Accent: With the hybrid deduplication enabled by DXi Accent software, enterprise customers gain flexibility for distributing deduplication operations to media servers, reducing LAN or WAN traffic for backup, disaster recovery and direct tape creation.
• VM Protection: The DXi8500 is compatible with Quantum’s new vmPRO software, allowing IT departments to deploy a single system for protecting both physical and virtual environments.
• Simplified Enterprise Management: The DXi8500 includes a new scheduling tool that simplifies management of recurring tasks. The GUI provides a way for users to manage replication, set bandwidth quality of service, and schedule health checks, space reclamation and other functions.

Scalar i6000 Tape Library: Features
for Active Storage and Retrieval of Large Datasets

• Dual Robotics for High Availability: The Scalar i6000 now employs dual robotics to provide continual availability of Enterprise data such as media archives, backup sets, and big data content, without reducing library capacities. It offers the smallest footprint available for dual robot libraries.
• Active Vault for Enterprise Capacity: Its feature enables users to store vaulted tapes securely inside the Scalar i6000 chassis. The vaulted media remains within the library, eliminating media handling, reducing application licensing costs, and allowing enterprises to keep media safe, accessible and managed. Active Vault also leverages Quantum’s Extended Data Life Management (EDLM), an automated data integrity checking feature, to automatically scan all vaulted tapes on a user-specified schedule to verify the integrity of the extended media pool.
• Automated Media Pool: Dynamic provisioning in the Scalar i6000 creates a pool of unassigned slots and media and makes it available to any partition, addressing the problem of data growth in enterprise environments. This non-disruptive feature eliminates wasted capacity from over-provisioning, providing improved resource utilisation and reduced costs.

Quantum Vision 4.1: Enhanced Management
Across Backup and Archive Resources

• Improved Multi-Site Advanced Reporting: It consolidates management across different locations, systems, and tiers for enterprise disk and tape. Enhancements include DXi Advanced Reporting synchronised for multiple DXi systems, whether they are located nearby or across the globe.
• View of Entire Enterprise Backup Resources: New graphical status reports include replication and disk-to-tape connections, providing a common view of job status across multiple, linked disk and tape systems.
• New Graphical Analytic Tools: Vision 4.1 employs graphical tools to present cross-indexed data for Scalar tape library drives and media, issuing reports with user-defined thresholds that indicate when media needs to be migrated or replaced. New analytic graphs also cover DXi replication, capacity utilisation, and space reclamation progress.

Suzanne Becker Gallagher, senior vice president, Marketing, Datalink, said: "Our enterprise customers continue to grapple with the challenges of data growth, constrained budgets, and the complexity of protecting data in virtual and cloud environments. Quantum’s Enterprise offerings for data protection and management continue to meet these demands in the marketplace."

Rob Clark, senior vice president, Disk and Tape Data Protection Group, said: "Quantum’s unique combination of disk, tape and management solutions for Enterprise data protection stands unmatched in delivering value to customers worldwide. A recent independent analyst survey of Quantum customers found that for every $1 invested in Quantum solutions, customers saw $4.72 in return. To achieve that kind of ROI requires a continual, aggressive pursuit of innovation."

Jeff Boles, senior analyst, Taneja Group, said: "With the latest DXi8500, Scalar, and management announcements, Quantum continues to broadly advance the features and capabilities of their data protection storage solutions, reaching well beyond single tricks or technologies. The net-net is that their portfolio continues to offer Enterprises better integrated protection solutions that span more locations, types of clients, and potential storage needs than any other single data protection storage company on the market."
 
Pricing and Availability

• The DXi8500 with DXi 2.1 software will be available in December, starting at $300,000 MSRP.
• The Scalar i6000 dual robotics option will be available in December, starting at $50,000 MSRP.
• The Active Vault feature in the Scalar i6000 is available, at $10,000 MSRP.
• Vision 4.1 software is available. Vision software plus one Scalar or DXi license is $5,500 MSRP. Additional Scalar and DXi licenses are $2,750.