Quantum is pulling it all together - its management software that is.

The company this week announced a new management interface that it calls Vision, which manages all its disk and tape systems (Compare Tape Library products) and its backup, recovery and archive systems (Compare Data Backup and Replication products). The package includes detailed reporting, utilization, trending, statistics and analysis. It starts at $7,500 for monitoring two Quantum disk or tape systems.

Vision provides detailed trend analysis of performance, de-duplication ratios, capacity utilization and replication functionality. Storage administrators can track data reduction over time and develop reports that measure ROI and future capacity needs.

Quantum also expanded its DXi family of disk backup appliances with the introduction of the DXi7500, which features both de-duplication and replication capability. The new DXi7500 has 9TB of usable capacity, offering an entry point system for midrange customers. The Quantum DXi family scales to over 180TB.

The company also offers two types of data duplication – de-duplication during ingest, de-duplication as a post process – each type is controlled by policies. In adaptive mode during ingest, the DXi 7500 operates at 1.6TB/hour; in deferred post-process mode, it operates at 2TB/hour; and, without de-duplication in native virtual tape library mode it operates at 4TB/hour.

Quantum would recommend matching the type of de-duplication to the task at hand:

* Small office/branch office backups – Adaptive de-duplication.
* Backups with large amounts of new data – Deferred de-duplication.
* Short retention database log file backups – No de-duplication.
* Backup of virtual servers – Adaptive de-duplication.
* Non-backup copies of image files – No de-duplication.
* Large OLTP database backup – Deferred de-duplication or no de-duplication.
* Database record backup – Adaptive de-duplication or deferred de-duplication.
* User file shares backup – Adaptive de-duplication or deferred de-duplication.
* Mailbox backups – Adaptive de-duplication.

The DXi7500 9TB capacity model starts at $135,000.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.