Newest Dell EMC data protection appliance heads downstream

Until last year, Dell EMC data protection involved separate offerings of Avamar backup software and Data Domain deduplication appliances. The vendor changed that strategy in May 2017 with the launch of the Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) family.

On Tuesday, Dell EMC brought out IDPA 4400, extending the disk-based product for backup and disaster recovery at satellite offices.  The new hardware is aimed at companies with roughly 2,000 employees, 1,000 virtual machines and 200 TB of storage.

The 4400 is the fifth version in the IDPA product line, and it offers the lowest usable capacity at 24 TB.  It carries a list price of about $80,000.

“The IDPA 4400 is for customers that want a dense platform that they can rack themselves and grow in place,” said Ruya Barrett, a vice president of marketing at Dell EMC data protection.

Dell introduced the IDPA line in part to siphon business away from startups Cohesity and Rubrik, Barrett said.

“They are definitely the (competitors) we’re watching. They have checked the box for simplicity, but they do at the cost of performance and efficiency.”

The 2U box is designed on Dell PowerEdge 14th generation storage servers. IDPA 4400 is available as a turnkey appliance preconfigured with 96 TB of disk capacity. Customers can start as low as 24 TB and scale capacity in 12-terabyte increments with additional license keys.

Software is based on the Avamar code and embeds a backup application, storage analytics and an application configuration manager. Dell EMC guarantees up to 55-1 data deduplication with Data Domain Boost on all IDPA hardware.

The HTML5 management interface is integrated with VMware vSphere, Oracle RMAN and SQL Management Studio.

The vendor claims IDPA 4400 protects about 5 PB of usable storage. With optional Cloud Disaster Recovery software, an enterprise could natively tier up to 14 PB of deduplicated data from IDPA 4400 to an Amazon Web Services S3 target.

For long-term retention, IDPA supports AWS and Microsoft Azure, as well as Dell EMC-branded Elastic Cloud Storage and Virtustream.

Selling more Dell EMC data protection gear is part of a larger overall goal to grow its storage business. It closed the April quarter with $4.1 billion in storage sales, up 10% and marking its first positive territory since the Dell-EMC merger closed in 2016.

Dell EMC data protection ranked third last quarter with nearly 13% of the worldwide market, according to IT research firm IDC. That placed it ahead of Commvault (9%), but behind market leaders Veritas (17%) and IBM (16%).

IDC ranked Dell first in sales of purpose-built backup appliances with $520 million, good for 9% growth. Dell EMC represented more than half of the $842 million quarterly total reported by IDC.