Quantum Brings Capacity-On-Demand To SMB Dedupe Appliance

Quantum's new DXi4601 can be configured with raw capacity of 4 TBs, 8 TBs, or 16 TBs, and offers customers and their solution providers non-disruptive scalability, said Steve Whitner, product marketing manager for the company's disk backup products.

However, each DXi4601 is pre-populated with 12 TBs as it is installed, Whitner said. "Customers can start out with 4 TBs or 8 TBs, and then license more capacity," he said. "This is the first dedup appliance with capacity on demand. It's easy. Just turn the license on (for the extra capacity). The partner can turn the licenses on remotely. There's no re-racking, no service visit, not need for an IT person to visit the site."

Best of all, the capacity can be gradually increased with no penalty compared to purchasing the full 12 TBs of capacity, Whitner said. "There's no penalty to delay and activate the license later," he said. "Customers can buy 4 TBs now, then six months later activate 4 more TBs."

The alternative in the SMB market is to scale up with multiple nodes in a quasi-grid, which can be expensive, Whitner said. "Our position is, we want to be a price leader," he said. "We feel that if the price is lower, we can grow this market."

It seems like a good idea to Mark Teter, CTO of Advanced Solutions Group, a Denver-based solution provider and Quantum partner.

A lot of ASG's customers are either small businesses or, in the case of a major grocery chain, large businesses with hundreds or thousands of remote offices, Teter said.

"In remote offices, storage requirements are usually undersized because those offices may add new people or new applications," he said. "Next thing you know, you've outgrown your storage appliance. This happens with any security or storage or other appliance which is priced based on size. Quantum makes it real easy for the central office to upgrade capacity with the license key without the need to go to the remote office and add new hardware."

Quantum has set the bar for ease of use and deployment of backup technology in environments which are remote or which have no IT personnel, Teter said.

"At the same time, it is providing all the features customers need including deduplication, OST (Symantec OpenStorage API), and global dedupe," he said. "That's very important to customers."

The Quantum DXi4601 provides 1.7 TBs per hour in-line deduplication performance with Quantum's variable-block data reduction technology, which increases the efficiency of the dedupe process compared to other vendors who use fixed data block sizes, Whitner said.

The Quantum DXi4601 is currently available with a list price of $21,500 for a 4-TB configuration.