At the Dell Storage Forum in Paris this week, Dell launched a back-up appliance – the DL4000 with AppAssure virtual server and cloud back-up software – and an upgrade to its DL2300 Commvault appliance, with increased capacity and some new data protection features.
The DL4000 is a completely new back-up appliance aimed at SMEs that comes in a 1U form factor and can take up to 5.5TB of data. The hardware is bundled with AppAssure 5.3 and features snapshots, replication, data deduplication and compression. The device can also run two virtual machines as disaster recovery standbys that can be up and running quickly should an outage occur.
The DL2300 is built on newer Dell server hardware with a faster processor and comes bundled with CommVault Simpana 9. It has increased disk capacity, hardware snapshots, and source and target data deduplication. Disk expansion is via MD1200 shelves and two maximum capacities are available: a value category, up to 252TB; and enterprise, which provides up to 480TB.
Dell bought AppAssure in February 2012. The product is back-up and data protection software. Back-ups can be of physical or virtual machines, and virtual environments supported include VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. Cloud services can be used as a target for back-ups and support replication, failover and data deduplication.
Back-up appliances are an increasingly popular option for smaller businesses or branch offices in larger organisations. They bundle data protection software with hardware processing and disk capacity in an easy-to-configure format.
Back-up appliances are available from a number of suppliers, including Dell, Arkeia, Revinetix, StorServer, Symantec and Tandberg, and are differentiated by capacity and the back-up app they come bundled with.