The enterprise grade DXi9000 and the smaller DXi4800 are enhanced replacements for the DXi6900 and DXi 4700 respectively.

Storage vendor Quantum has announced their newest DXi backup appliances, the DXi9000 and the DXi4800. There are no major new increases in functionality, but the existing capabilities have been enhanced. In addition, these are the first backup appliances on the market to use 12 TB hard drives, which makes them denser and enhances TCO items such as reducing rack footprint and reducing storage and cooling costs.

The DXi is Quantum’s series of dedupe backup appliances. This is the fourth generation, with the first generation dating back to 2006.

“We don’t have a huge market share in this space, but it is still an important business for us,” said Eric Bassier, Senior Director of Product Management and Product Marketing at Quantum.

These models are replacements for the third generation DXi6900 and DXi4700. The DXi9000 scales from 51 TB to 1 PB of useable capacity, while the DXi4800 starts at 8 TB of useable capacity and scales to 171 TB.

“The DXi9000 is our enterprise product,” Bassler said. “Given that our customer base is mainly medium to larger enterprises, I would describe the DXi4800 as more of a ROBO [Remote Office/Branch Office] product for the enterprise than a midmarket product.”

The core functionality of these appliances is similar to the preceding generations, with no-head turning new features – although the TCO-related enhancements are significant and will make the solutions easier to sell.

“The differentiation of the appliances does not change with the new generation,” Bassier said. “We have always had very fast ingest and restores, and we have improved that further. We now use solid state in the DXi4800 as well as in the DXi9000, not  for user data but for software to use for metadata operations. It continues to be  easy to scale with our key-based capacity on-demand licensing. We continue to have very good integrations with Veeam and Veritas NetBackup.”

The DXi9000, however, becomes the first backup appliance to take advantage of 12 TB hard drives. The DXi9000 also has a new high-density expansion chassis option to enable 1 petabyte of usable capacity [pre-deduplication] in only 10U of rack space. Bassier said that these sorts of things are increasingly important for customers

“One of the things driving our roadmap is customer pain points which see them want to reduce the footprint of their backup infrastructure,” he said. “We have been pushing the hard drive density curve ahead of the rest of the market, and are now the first company to introduce 12 TB drives in backup appliances. They are very efficient, minimizing rack space, power and cooling costs. The expansion chassis being able to store 1 TB of usable capacity in 10U of rack space is another differentiator. Others require double or triple that.

“I feel that what resonates the most with bigger customers today is gaining back rack space in their data centres and reducing power and cooling costs,” Bassier added. “That’s because this is now a mature market. Everybody in this market has good performance. Everybody has reliable products, and a stable feature set. These TCO issues, however are much more a pain point for customers than they were five years ago. They help us win against Data Domain and HPE and the others. The DXi9000 has the best density on the market, and that’s something that partners can win with.”

The DXi9000 and DXi4800 are available now.