The IDPA series Dell EMC rolled out last year was aimed at the enterprise, but the DP4400 was specifically built for SMB and midmarket customers, and is being targeted there rather than at ROBO deployments of enterprises.

Today, Dell EMC is formally announcing the availability of the DP4400, a smaller version of the Integrated Data Protection Appliance [IDPA] series that they announced in May, 2017. Like the other members of the family, the DP4400 is a converged data protection offering that combines backup, deduplication, replication and recovery, disaster recovery and long-term retention to the cloud. Unlike the other members, which are all enterprise models, the DP4400 is aimed squarely at SMB and midmarket customers.

“The genesis of IDPA was the trend of convergence coming to data protection,” said Ruya Atac-Barrett, VP Marketing, Data Protection at Dell EMC. “Customers want things that are pre-integrated, pre-built and managed as a holistic system – and serviced that way –  with all the software and hardware that you need. We have a broad data protection portfolio which includes both software and hardware components, but this fits with that buying choice. If on the other hand, they like say, Veritas or Veeam software, we can still sell them Data Domain hardware. Some also just want software, and we can sell them software-only.”

The IDPA DP4400 appliance is a dense 2U platform powered by Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation servers.

“It has two major use cases,” Atac-Barrett said. “The first is long term retention for archiving, and it supports four clouds: Microsoft Azure, Virtustream, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, and AWS. With a single 24 TB appliance, this allows the customer to expand to 96 TB – which is 20 per cent more than competitors like Rubrik or Cohesity – and with another 192 TB of usable storage in the cloud , for a total of 288 TB usable capacity. We are also able to deduplicate this at a 55: 1 efficiency rate, which means that the effective usable capacity of that single appliance is 14.1 PB – more than almost any SMB would ever need.” Atac-Barrett also noted that the DP4400 is able to leverage NVMe flash. Not surprisingly, it is also fully optimized for VMware environments.

“The second use case is a Cloud Disaster Recovery capability, which I think is the most exciting,” Atac-Barrett continued. “The native capability to disaster recover to the cloud lets them copy to AWS instead of having a secondary site, which is important for SMB and midmarket customers. They have the ability to recover selected virtual machines in minutes. It also requires a minimal cloud footprint, because of that same efficient architecture that delivers the 55:1 deduplication rate.” The IDPA DP4400 comes with 5TB licenses each for Cloud Disaster Recovery and Cloud Tier as well as a Dell EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines starter pack that provides five VMs and a one-year subscription.

Atac-Barrett stressed that while they expect some of the IDPA DP4400 will sell into the enterprise remote-office/branch office market [ROBO], that is not where the product was built to sell.

“The IDPAs introduced last year were all built for the enterprise,” she said. “The IDPA 4400 is directed at a completely new segment for us in this space. We are number one in the enterprise, but we have struggled with the SMB buyer. The IDPA 4400 is a very targeted solution aimed at what SMB and midmarket customers want – ease of management, ease of install and ease to grow – yet with performance at scale. It has been built from the ground up to address specific midsize customer needs – including ones around cloud with they will want for agility.

“We have grown up in the enterprise and know the enterprise buyer, and we expect that there will be a lot of demand for ROBO deployments,” Atac-Barrett continued. “We will sell it to them, but that’s not our focus. We have been laser-focused on mid-sized and SMB customers with this, and minimally on ROBO. We have seen strong demand for this product for the last year and a half, and we couldn’t just take our enterprise products and sell it to SMBs. That market has very specific requirements.”

Atac-Barrett said that the IDPA has done well since it was introduced last year, and that the early signs for the DP4400 – which actually went into general availability on June 22 – are extremely promising, especially in the channel.

“The IDPA has gotten a lot of traction in enterprise accounts, and when this one GA’d on June 22, in the first week, we got hundreds of quotes,” she stated. “We have already closed deals. The channel was critical on this one in beta, and the channel excitement is very high. Usually when a product hits GA, no one has even heard about it. But our channel sellers have been asking for this for a while. It took us a year and a half to meet the specific requirements of the market, but it is now here.”

Atac-Barrett pointed out that Dell’s robust channel incentives around storage can be leveraged here, and noted that it comes on the heels of a significant Q1 for the Data Protection Division.

The Dell EMC IDPA DP4400 is available now.