Quantum Introduces vmPRO 4601 Appliance To Provide VM Backup For SMBs

Making use of its acquisition of Pancetera Software in June, as well as hardware it announced a few weeks ago, Quantum has introduced the vmPRO 4601 Appliance, a hardware/software bundle that is designed to perform virtual machine backup for small to midsize businesses with requirements of 10 Tbytes or less. The company also announced vmPRO Software, which works with its family of DXI deduplication appliances for larger organizations. Quantum bought Pancetera for $12 million--$8.4 million in cash and $3.6 million in Quantum common stock--and said at the time that it intended to further integrate the technology into its longer-term roadmaps for both its DXi and its StorNext file sharing and archive offerings.

"I had a different hardware deduplication solution that was at the end of its usable life and didn’t scale any further,” says K. Mitch Goldenberg, associate director of IT/IS for Concert Pharmaceuticals, in Lexington, Mass. His organization went with the Pancetera software, and, after learning Pancetera was in merger negotiations with Quantum, went with the Quantum hardware--essentially, doing on its own what Quantum announced. "The pricing at the low end was better than that of the vendor I was with before," he says. With the hardware/software combination, he can retain data for three months, instead of a week, and can do backups in 90 minutes, rather than all night, he says. He’s pleased with the Quantum acquisition of Pancatera because it gives him more security that the product will still be around, he says.

By optimizing active and inactive data, filtering out inactive, old or expired data, and handling overprovisioned virtual machines, the software can reduce the amount of data to be backed up by up to 75%, says Steve Whitner, marketing manager of data protection for Quantum, based in San Jose, Calif. It also offers functionality such as the ability to make fast copies of VMs, and enables the organization to get good deduplication results when combined with a deduplication appliance, he says. The hardware is the VM4601, built on the DX4601 hardware platform Quantum announced earlier this month, and is a new model of the vmPRO 4000 the company announced about six weeks ago with more capacity, he says.

Leveraging the technology it gained from its acquisition of Pancetera earlier this year, Quantum has enabled a virtual machine management platform directly targeted for the SMB market space, says Steve Brasen, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. Of particular note, he says, is the inclusion of full duplication capabilities that greatly reduce storage requirements and the network impacts of data migrations and backups. This approach will significantly reduce backup and storage costs and is well-suited for SMBs that have limited budgets and management resources, he adds.

The vmPRO 4601 starts at $24,250 with 4 Tbytes and is scheduled to be available Nov. 1. The vmPRO software is available now; a typical license for a deployment used with an 8TB DXi6701 appliance is $8,080, including one year of service.

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