Quantum Digs Into Disk Backup: Page 3 of 4

The new DX100, which will be available near the end of the third quarter this year, is made up of a controller box in a six-foot rack with up to eight ATA arrays, allowing for initial capacity from 10 Tbytes to 50 Tbytes. The box will ship with hardware features like redundant, hot-swap fans, power supplies, dual redundant Fibre Channel ports, and RAID protection. It is designed to handle the backup and restore requirements of large distributed data centers running mission-critical database, CRM, and ERP applications, Quantum says.

Pricing hasn’t been set yet for the DX100, but Kenyon says he expects the price per gigabyte to be between $10 and $12. The box will start beta-testing in about two months.

Because the DX100 is managed like a tape library, Quantum says, customers can tailor disk volumes to a set number of tape cartridges, allowing benefits like multiplexing simultaneous backup jobs and sharing of backup from the box to multiple tape devices.

In addition to the new DX100 and the enhanced DX30, Quantum will also be announcing a new compression engine technology tomorrow. By compressing the data going into the DX30 or DX100, the hardware-based HBA approximately doubles the available capacity of each box, Quantum claims. The engine also provides more I/O offload from the enhanced backup controller for performance benefits. One or more compression boards can be added to existing or future DX products to enhance capacity.

Kenyon says that the enhancements are being tested, and that the company already has some customers lined up. Quantum has about 100 customers for its existing DX30, which has been shipping for about a quarter, and Kenyon says that about 70 percent of them have indicated that they need more capacity.