Monday at its EMC World conference, EMC announced a line of three deduplicating backup targets that are the product of its long-rumored collaboration with Quantum. While the 3D disk libraries bear some resemblance to Quantum's own DXi line, EMC has done more than just OEM Quantum's product. In addition to using EMC Clariion disk arrays, which gives them greater scalability, and RAID 6 for enhanced reliability, they use Western Digital's GreenPower 1 TB drives that draw half as much power as standard 1 TB drives when spinning idle.The DL3D 1500 (up to 36 TB capacity and 720 GB per hour performance) and DL3D 3000 (148 TB and 1.44 TB per hour) support both a NAS interface over Gigabit Ethernet and virtual tape library interface over 4 Gbps Fibre Channel. Users can choose between post-process deduplication to maximize data ingestion rates or inline deduplication to simplify management and maximize disk utilization. Both can replicate deduplicated data for branch office protection of disaster recovery purposes.

EMC also has integrated Quantum's deduping software, post processing only, into its FalconStor-based DL4000 VTL. The combination can support up to 822 TB of usable disk space, of which 144 TB can hold deduplicated data while ingesting data at 8 TB per hour and preserving features like direct tape export that have made the FalconStor VTL so popular. Deduplication is an option with version 3.2 of the Disk Library software, so current users should be able to upgrade.

New DL3d 4000s also include MAID-style disk spin down to reduce prower consumption, a first for an EMC product. Since the DL3D 4000 uses a Clariion CX array as its storage platform, this means EMC has built spin down/spin up into the CX3 firmware and will hopefully offer this feature for other applications and environments.