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Dell inserts Hyper-V smarts into its DL backup boxen

Widens range with new appliances and standby VMs

Dell has added two new back-up appliances to its range, top-and-tailing its existing DL1000 product and adding neat features such as virtual standby VMs.

The DL series range is for small and medium businesses and are PowerEdge servers running AppAssure software. The 1U DL1000, with 2TB-3TB of capacity, was announced in July 2014. Enterprises are offered the larger capacity DR series appliance range.

The DL1000 1TB capacity model is the new entry point with the DL4300 being for mid-level businesses. Its standard capacities run from 5TB to 40TB.

DL1000 1TB buyers get semi-continuous data protection with snapshots down every 60 minutes, changed data tracking and de-duplication so only unique changed blocks get backed up.

Dell says the 2U DL4300 feature set includes:

  • 13th generation PowerEdge server with two Xeon E5-2640v3 2.6GHz (8-core) or E5-2660v3 2.6GHz (10-core) processors and 128GB to 256GB memory
  • 60TB to 120TB usable capacity
  • Virtual standbys of protected applications, allowing recovery from a disaster in seconds
  • Rapid Appliance Self Recovery (RASR) to recover the appliance in the event of a failure, either back to factory settings or a defined restore point

The standby virtual machine (VM) feature is neat with two or four licensed Hyper-V VMs. Users "can view and manage all standby virtual machines in a single interface, eliminating the need to access the hypervisor itself and minimising the complexity commonly associated with protecting virtual environments".

DL4300

DL4300

Dell's DR4100 back-up appliance has a 2.7TB to 27TB configuration range. Its DR6000 is an enterprise back-up appliance with up to 252TB of post-RAID capacity. Dell also has the smaller DR2000v virtual (Software-only) deduping back-up appliance that runs under ESXi or Hyper-V. This includes compression and replication and capacity ranges from 1TB to 4TB. It's targeted at remote and branch offices.

The back-up appliance market is hotly contested, with players such as Arcserve – who added a new product set yesterday – Barracuda, Seagate's EVault and Unitrends.

The latter has just announced v8.1 of its software, saying it "provides customers with up to 50 times faster back-up windows, a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) deployment option and advanced support for VMware vSphere 6".

It's faster for Hyper-V environments because "a changed-block tracking feature [in a] new filter driver more optimally tracks changes to virtual machines at the hypervisor-level as they occur, resulting in up to 50 times faster incremental back-up windows and much shorter recovery point objectives (RPOs)."

Features like this and Dell's virtual standby machines show just how fast the back-up appliance market is moving away from legacy backup software products.

Dell's DL1000 starts at $5,354. The DL1000 1TB starts at $1,999 with the larger DL4300 costing from $22,560 (5TB) to $77,655 (40TB), appreciably more. Both the DL4300 and DL1000 1TB use AppAssure v5.4.3 software and are available now – the DL4300 from Dell direct and its channel, the DL1000 1TB online only at Dell. ®

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