Quantum unveils enterprise-class cloud backup services

Quantum today announced an enterprise-class backup service that includes data deduplication aimed at protecting data in virtual server environments. The new cloud service is built on Quantum's vmPRO virtual machine backup software and its new virtual deduplication appliance, the DXi V1000, which was also unveiled today. The all-virtual platform serves as the foundation for Xerox's recently announced cloud backup and disaster recovery services. "This is not your Amazon cloud where you put your credit card in and hope for the best," said Henrik Rosendahl, Quantum's vice president of Virtualization Solutions. "Xerox likes to brand themselves as a business-class cloud versus a consumer cloud service." Quantum plans to begin offering its own backup service through other public and private cloud infrastructures later this year. In addition to using third-party services, Quantum expects to launch its own public cloud offering in the next three months. Quantum's new service, Henrik said, bridges a gap between consumer cloud services such as Carbonite and Mozy and enterprise-class array-based data backup and replication. The latter can cost tens of thousands of dollars -- even millions of dollars -- to deploy. "There's a big gap in mid-size enterprises for disaster recovery," Henrik said. Quantum's vmPRO virtual backup software, which Quantum acquired when it bought Pancetera Software last year, works by cleaning out file structures in virtual machines. That reduces the amount of data that needs to be backed up. For example, vmPRO automatically discovers data blocks on virtual machines marked for deletion and erases them. By reducing the amount of data that needs to be backed up over a WAN, the software frees up bandwidth. The vmPRO software is also tightly integrated with VMware's vCenter management software, allowing it to discover any VMs that may have been created since the last backup, Henrik said. While vmPRO does compress data prior to replication to a cloud, it moves the VMs in a native VMware format, so regardless of what backup software is used in the end, it can still be restored from the cloud using vmPRO. "It allows the customer to download all the software and put it in remote branch locations," Henrik said. "Then, from those remote locations, the customer can replicate a full data set either back to the Xerox cloud or back to their own data center. So this can be a public, private or hybrid cloud." Quantum's new DXi V1000 is a software-only version of its DXi series of backup appliances. The software can now be run on virtual machines, creating up to a 2TB pool of storage for backing up data while at the same time deduplicating it. "We've taken all that software value and the inherent value of inline deduplication...and made it into a virtual appliance," said Casey Burns, Quantum's marketing manager for data protection products. "This enables any size organization to have a disaster recovery solution." Xerox is charging $2,000 per month for a 2TB backup, according to Burns. A private instance of Quantum's DXi V1000 virtual backup appliance costs $2,250 per terabyte of backup capacity. Additionally, Quantum will charge separately for support and maintenance.