Hi Matthew,

I support DXi's and networker on an everyday basis.

The 4xxx is entry-level and hasn't got that many ways of connecting, 
furthermore it cannot be used as a vtl if you had that in mind.

The thing you need to make sure if you use it via NFS is to do NFS 
tuning on your backup server. That will improve performance a lot.
Don't even consider using CIFS, it generally sucks on the DXi's (just MHO).

Also make sure you're running the newest firmware on the DXi itself. I 
think it's 2.1.3 right now.

Also make sure that replication is set up and working before you put 
backup data on the DXi's, because without replication you have a single 
point of failure.

What kind of retention are you planning to have or are you using? The 
dedupe feature of the DXi gets better the longer the data stays on it.

MS Exchange data is not good for dedupe. So if you have a lot of that, 
consider keeping your tape library for it or use a normal disk storage 
system for the exchange backups.

Regarding the GigE interface, you can bond them together if you like. 
That'll give you sufficient network performance considering the number 
of spindles in the 4xxx series.

Most of our customer using DXi's have the data on them for 1-3 months 
and then use tape for the longer retention times. You could set all 
clients to backup to the DXi with 3 months retention and then use 
scheduled cloning with longer retentions to tape pools.

/tony


Tony Albers  - Technical Consultant  -  Proact Systems A/S
Tel: +45 7010 1132 - Mobile: +45 2210 5208 - Fax: +45 7010 1142
toal AT proact DOT dk  www.proact.dk - We secure mission-critical information -

On 11/01/2012 02:19 PM, Matthew Huff wrote:
> We are looking at replacing our tape backup system with a replicated 
> disk-based solution like the Quantum DXi4000.
> My concerns are that it exposes itself to the backup software as a NFS device 
> instead of iSCSI/FCoE or even FC.
> Another concern is that it only has GigE interfaces. Does anyone have any 
> experience with the Quantum solution
> or other similar SMB solutions?
>
> ----
> Matthew Huff             | 1 Manhattanville Rd
> Director of Operations   | Purchase, NY 10577
> OTA Management LLC       | Phone: 914-460-4039
> aim: matthewbhuff        | Fax:   914-460-4139
>