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The DP4400, an integrated data protection appliance (IDPA) that Dell introduced Tuesday, was 18 months in the making and exposes Dell EMC channel partners to a new, broad opportunity with SMBs and the midmarket — as well as the remote, or branch, office.

The latest IDPA from Dell EMC expands the vendor’s portfolio that up until now catered to enterprise customers.

Dell EMC’s Ruya Atac-Barrett

“This product enables the channel to service a bigger customer base that can’t take advantage of our wider portfolio because of the unique product requirements that they have,” Rüya Atac-Barrett, vice president, product marketing for data protection at Dell EMC, told us.

In addition to data-protection product features, such as performance, efficiency and comprehensive coverage, SMB and midmarket customers also need a lower entry price point and operational simplicity.

Dell EMC says the new DP4400 offers converged data protection — backup, deduplication, replication and recovery, disaster recovery and long-term retention to the cloud.

“It’s everything the SMB [and] midmarket customer needs in a turnkey appliance,” Atac-Barrett said, adding that the DP 4400 offers ease of growth, ease of deployment and ease of management.

The IDPA DP4400 appliance is in a dense 2U platform powered by Dell EMC PowerEdge 14^th generation servers featuring:

Atac-Barrett also points out that DP4400 offers comprehensive coverage, whether for physical workloads, multi-hypervisor workloads, virtual workloads, modern workloads such as mySQL or MongoDB, or homegrown apps.

“The breadth of coverage that’s taken us years to build out on the software side, customers get with the appliance.”

What this means for customers is that the need to build out silos of protection, storage or solutions is eliminated.

Atac-Barrett notes that competitors should be worried because Dell EMC – which has been in the data-protection space for more than a decade on the enterprise side – built an appliance from the ground up to target a very specific customer – the SMB/midmarket customer – with a unique use case and set of requirements.

For partners, the introduction of the DP4400 fills a long-awaited need in the SMB and midmarket space.

“This is exactly the product that they’ve been asking for, and they can use some of the best channel incentives in the market today around data protection,” said Atac-Barrett.

Partner product training and enablement are underway as general availability of the DP4400 began June 22. Pricing starts at under $80,000 and targets organizations with fewer than 5,000 employees, or 500 to 1,000 VMs.