Move over, Amazon Glacier: Quantum launches Q-Cloud for cheap ‘business class’ backup storage (updated)

Updated at 6:50 p.m. PT with comments from Nirvanix and Amazon.

Amazon debuted Glacier for archival storage at just $.01 per GB per month about a week ago. But while Glacier might be good for compliance purposes (data you likely will never need to look at again), many large businesses need backup storage that’s easier and faster to access.

Enterprise backup storage player Quantum wants to fill that role with its just-announced Q-Cloud, a new solution that combines on-premise storage with cloud storage to create a more cost-effective backup solution for enterprises. Once your business starts using more than 72TB (which is plausible for a 10,000-plus employee company), the price is actually the same as Glacier’s cheapest tier: $.01 per GB per month. (This rate assumes a typical deduplication ratio of 15-to-1.)

Q-Cloud offers to bring cloud-based data protection to the biggest enterprises. Using optimized deduplication tech, a company can rely on having their important data backed up at a lower overall cost.

“This is a business-class solution,” Quantum senior VP of cloud solutions Henrik Rosendahl told VentureBeat. “You could say that Amazon’s Glacier is economy class.”

Rosendahl said that Nirvanix, a major enterprise cloud storage business in its own right, offers storage for “primary data and app data.” If a company were to use Nirvanix for the same purpose as Quantum, he said, it would be too expensive. He also dismissed Box and Engynte as players that could handle the amount of data Quantum does for backup. As for Amazon S3 as an option for backup, he also said it was too expensive.

Q-Cloud is available to U.S. and U.K. customers as of today. You can check out pricing below, assuming a typical deduplication ratio of 15-to-1.

New York City-based Quantum has more than 50,000 customers, and it already serves 85 companies in the Fortune 100. Its future targets are companies in the Fortune 5,000.

Update: Nirvanix Vice President of Marketing Steve Zivanic responded to Quantum’s charges of Nirvanix being “too expensive” with a complete take-down of Q-Cloud. He writes:

Q-Cloud is just a collection of their existing DXi Data Domain backup appliance clones stuffed into a single data center in the US and one in the UK, and that’s pretty much it. There is no REST API interface, there is no object storage, no secure multi-tenancy, no global namespace, no live replicas, no autonomic self-healing, no data consistency, and no data permanence (requisite for archiving) — all of the things that comprise an enterprise cloud storage service. This is just dedupe block storage stuffed in a data center wrapped with a “cloud” label in an attempt to distract customers from actual cloud storage services offerings. Any vendor with aging hardware can do the same thing and claim they are now in the cloud storage business. Quantum fundamentally lacks the cloud storage software IP required to implement a cloud storage service across multiple geo locations.

Update 2: Amazon also felt the need to respond to Quantum’s claims. An Amazon spokesperson e-mailed this response:

It’s important to note that efficiencies gained by deduplication of raw data prior to storage are applicable to any type of system used to store that data. This would include Amazon Glacier which is architected to allow customers to use data deduplication to reduce storage costs if they favor this approach. When performing cost comparisons of Amazon Glacier to other back-up and archive solutions, we recommend customers compare apples to apples – raw storage or deduplication for both systems. When doing so, Amazon Glacier appears to be significantly more cost effective than the alternative solutions being discussed.

Data center in the clouds photo via Shutterstock