It’s the battle of the data storage disruptors versus legacy vendors. And Dell EMC is coming out swinging against startups Cohesity and Rubrik with a new integrated data appliance that targets mid-size organizations and remote or branch office locations.

Dell EMC’s new device provides converged data protection, and comes bundled with software for backup, deduplication, replication and recovery, along with disaster recovery and long-term retention to the cloud. It also hits the market at a time when the two software-defined storage startups aren’t making things any easier for traditional backup and storage giants like Dell EMC.

To be clear: Dell EMC is still the market leader, according to IDC’s first-quarter 2018 numbers that came out last month. IDC’s quarterly revenue figures for purpose-built backup appliances put Dell EMC’s revenue at $520 million. It was the only vendor to gain market share with 38.4 percent growth year over year.

For comparison, No. 2 vendor Veritas trailed behind with $159 million in revenue. And Hewlett Packard Enterprise, in third place, brought in $35 million.

“First, it’s built on award-winning Dell PowerEdge 14G servers,” said Ruya Atac-Barrett, VP of product marketing in data protection at Dell EMC. “It’s flash enabled, and we’ve optimized it around high performance and efficiency at the same time.” NVMe-based flash shortens backup windows by up to two times, and backs up only deduplicated data requiring up to 98 percent less bandwidth, the company claims.

It also guarantees the lowest cost to protect data under the Dell EMC Future-Proof Loyalty program.

A single 2-unit system can grow from 24 terabytes (TB) to 96 TB with a license key, so there’s no down time or additional hardware needed. It also provides efficient data protection with 55:1 average deduplication, the company claims.

The device comes with cloud-based disaster recovery to Amazon Web Services built in. Each box comes with 5 TB licenses each for Cloud Disaster Recovery (DR) and Cloud Tier as well as a RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines starter pack that provides five VMs and a one-year subscription. “For cloud DR: it does failover in three-clicks and failbacks in two clicks without requiring any additional hardware,” Atac-Barrett said.

And as both Dell EMC and VMware are Dell Technologies’ brands, the new device is optimized for VMware environments. It includes integrations that allow VMware administrators to perform common backup and recovery tasks directly from the native vSphere user interface. It also includes automation across the VMware data protection stack.

Dell EMC’s new product announcement comes as both Cohesity and Rubrik are gaining momentum.

Cohesity last month closed a $250 million Series D funding round, bringing its total to $410 million. The company says this outpaces all other Series D enterprise software investments in the U.S. over the last 18 months. Its valuation now tops $1 billion.

It’s been rapidly adding features to its hyperconverged secondary storage platform, and says it saw a 600 percent increase in sales revenue in 2017, compared to the previous year, and more than doubled its customer count.

Fellow unicorn data storage startup Rubrik also recently updated its platform and has raised $292 million to date.

In February, the company announced a global bookings run rate approaching $300 million. And during fiscal year 2017, it more than quadrupled its customer base and tripled its employee count, compared to 2016.