Who pays $15k for 3TB? For an entire WHS from HP with 3.5TB of data, you'd be looking at less than $1k running server quality drives and could gain pretty much all of the functionality listed in this article if you are running in a windows environment. If you are running in a unix/linux distro, you can configure this for free. What am I missing that the additional $14k buys you?

Dell mantra of "simplifing IT" also has the undercurrent of "sodomizing Finance".

> What am I missing that the additional $14k buys you?

Convenience. $14K buys you a 30 minute setup time. And if you believe that...

Yep. Its roughly a box with 4x750G HD's so the hard cost is less than $500. Add in $10K for someone's overpriced backup "solution" (which you will quickly discover doesn't actually work for you, but additional modules are available for a "reasonable" price) and give Dell a nice $5K profit, and everyone's a WINNER!

"It has built-in file-level deduplication with Dell taking the decision that this offers enough data compression benefits on its own. Adding more expensive and processor-intensive deduplication is not warranted; that's Dell's gamble. CommVault's Mike McMahon, a senior director for world-wide OEM relations, said: "File-level de-duplication is good enough for the price point.""

That'll be because CV have no deduplication offering beyond single instancing then whereas Symantec do via their Puredisk technology. Not in BUE yet, but will come before long.

You're missing a lot. It's plug and play vs build your own.

We'll not really, but the comparison should not be versus WHS, but versus enterprise class D2D backup solutions which right now would cost you at least $20K in addition to the backup software to make this happen.

a place to store my pr0n.

paris, ;cos i would store it there if allowed.

Disk to Disk backups have been around for a long time. We used to use a cheap powervault as a backup staging area about 7 yers ago (and it wasn't a new idea then) we jus used to bakuo the machines over the network to the 'vault and tape the results during the day. Same result, much cheaper, no hype.

Something new please?

NAS or XP Box with SATA drives + Shadow Protect (www.storagecraft.com) takes about 1 hour to configure, and brings restore times down to minutes. A full server restore can be done in under an hour, and even to a virtual server environment.

I've not used tapes in years - that's just too 1980's. I even use eSata enclosures to hold the off-site backups.

You can keep your PnP 15K solution Dell. I'll build my own so that I know what's inside it, and can adjust the solution to suit my needs. Scalable, reliable, cost effective.