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Quantum is still chewing on its $15m royalty payout from Microsoft, but that was a one-off, and it needs to make plans if it doesn't wish to go hungry again. To that end, the storage firm is adding a dash of Simpana software to boost the growth of its Lattus object storage business.

It has also introduced a new virtual deduplicating backup appliance, the Dxi4000.

CommVault's Simpana is an enterprise-class data backup, archiving, reporting and disaster-recovery product for physical and virtual servers that stores data on disk.

Quantum has enabled its nearline Lattus-D object storage product to be a disk vault for Simpana 10, reasoning that the scalable Lattus technology can cope with constantly growing data sets produced by Simpana.

It points out that Lattus has "self-healing and self-protection capabilities, and enables automatic multi-site protection without the need for replication," or RAID – in other words it's efficient in its use of disk resources and is, Quantum claims, more effective at protection than "traditional redundant copy data protection schemes".

Lattus is integrated with Simpana using an S3 REST interface, Simpana, in turn, using Lattus' native REST API.

Quantum's Lattus is based on OEM'd object storage software from Amplidata, which was rumoured to be looking to be acquired by Intel or Verizon Terremark a few weeks ago. This has apparently fallen through due to pricing differences. Intel Capital invested in Amplidata in February 2012. Quantum invested at the same time. Its Lattus product initiatives give Quantum a strong interest in Amplidata's continued existence.

Earlier this month CommVault added VM-aware archiving capabilities to Simpana. It detects idle VMware VMs and moves them to archival storage – thus freeing up host server and fast storage resources for use by active VMs. Archived VMs can be recovered "instantly" and the VM Archiving facility is a Simpana 10 update.

DXi V4000

The DXi V4000 is a software-only deduplicating backup product which can ingest data at 4.9TB/hour and store it in 24TB of raw capacity, which is 360TB of effective capacity for deduped data according to Quantum (your mileage may vary). The product is a VMware virtual machine.

The V4000 is the second product in the V-range and is more powerful than the entry-level DXi V1000 with its 1TB/hour ingest rate. Quantum says it's the most powerful virtual deduping backup appliance out there, and provides a chart comparing the DXi V-range with HP's StoreOnce VSA and Riverbed's Whitewater product:

The validated Lattus-D and Simpana 10 products are available now, as is the DXi V4000. ®

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