Dell Storage Center OS 7 for All-Flash and Hybrid Arrays

Dell, Inc. announced Storage Center OS 7 (SCOS 7), following a three-year effort to redefine the economics of enterprise storage with an platform which embraces and helps accelerate the industry shift to modern, flash-based architectures.

Redefined for future-ready enterprise
SCOS 7 promotes the adoption of flash, elevates and abstracts data control through increased virtualization, and unifies Dell’s storage ecosystem across multiple portfolios. The release provides new intelligence and flexibility to help businesses ‘flash-forward,’ advancing their infrastructures to meet today’s needs and prepare for future challenges.

SCOS 7 delivers capabilities resulting
in significant business benefits for customers including:

• Helps lower acquisition costs across flash and hybrid arrays;
• Helps lower lifecycle costs through elevated, simplified management;
• Increased flexibility to respond to business and technology changes;
• Enhanced support for virtualization and cloud strategies; and
• Increased portfolio-level investment protection.

“Dell’s SC Series has always been an extremely progressive storage platform – and SCOS 7 is by far our most revolutionary software release to date,” said Alan Atkinson, VP and GM, Dell storage. “We designed the SC platform from the ground up to be future ready and this release takes flash, deduplication and system intelligence to the next level.“

Storage economics, enhanced capabilities
The industry price leader on a cost-per-gigabit basis for effective flash capacity, (1) Dell’s SC Series now offers all-flash tiers under $0.45/GB, and HDD tiers under $0.10/GB net effective capacity. (2) SCOS 7 makes storage technology practical for more workloads, enabling a fundamental transformation of the data center by eliminating acquisition cost
barriers for flash and lowering ongoing expense with simplified management and increased efficiency,

• The most comprehensive data reduction – SCOS 7 helps customers store more data on fewer drives. New, patented Intelligent Deduplication and enhanced Intelligent Block-Level Compression can provide up to 10:1 capacity savings, (3) reducing the cost of both flash and disk tiers. SCOS 7 data reduction is integrated with the SC Series’ features, including auto-tiering. Deduplication and compression are each applied automatically and dynamically to optimize performance and cost savings throughout the data lifecycle.
• Increased data center flexibility – SCOS 7 elevates the storage management control, helping customers respond to changing requirements rapidly and with minimal disruption. With Dell’s new Live Migrate feature, multi-array federation becomes a standard capability for SC9000, SC8000 and SC4020 arrays. Storage administrators can now move volumes quickly and seamlessly between arrays, optimizing and re-balancing the environment without interrupting workloads and without purchasing additional virtualization hardware or software.

SCOS 7 offers more granular management targeting and control

• New QoS features help administrators automatically allocate resources to match their business priorities, ensuring performance for mission-critical apps even in contentious multi-workload environments.
• VMware VVOLs support allows provisioning, monitoring and management of storage at a VM level.

Together, these two features simplify management of multi-tenancy and cloud environments, helping IT managers provide consistent, policy-based storage services to their clients.

Unified Dell Storage ecosystem
New Dell Storage Manager (DSM) software provides a common management platform with an HTML5-based interface for SC, PS and FS products. (4) Building on the familiar capabilities of the previous SC Series Enterprise Manager, SCOS 7 adds bi-directional cross-platform replication between SC and PS arrays, and ‘single pane of glass’ day-to-day management of both systems. Dell is the only storage vendor in the mid-range enterprise storage area to offer native cross-replication across product lines. (5)

PS Series customers now have the option to purchase either array platform with the knowledge that the full value of previous investments will be preserved and extended, if and when they decide to add SC to their environment.

“We’ve looked at various solutions from many of the flash storage vendors listed in Gartner’s Solid State Array Magic Quadrant. We found the deduplication and thin provisioning features of the Dell Storage SCOS 7 to offer the best efficiency and performance. On top of that, it’s easier to use,” said Samuel Nadeau, IT director, infrastructure and cloud services, SherWeb.

“With the Dell Storage SC Series, we can sell to our customers based on the fact that our cloud is based on an all-flash array. Performance degradation is a thing of the past, and they’ll be able to get the IO/s their applications require,” said Andrew Fisher, director of product engineering, Expedient.

“We saw a significant compression and data reduction ratio using the deduplication feature in Dell Storage SCOS 7, which is very good. Without Deduplication I would be forced to buy more drives every 12 months. With it I will have enough available space to accommodate our customers’ projected growth for the next 18-24 months,” said Hans de Jongh, director/owner, IT Creation.

SCOS 7 will be delivered as a free firmware upgrade for SC Series customers with a current support contract. Most features are available on SC9000, with availability across the SC Series portfolio planned for Q3, 2016. Dell PS Series customers who want to take advantage of the new PS and SC unified management and cross-platform replication capabilities can upgrade to the new PS 9.0 firmware, available this month at no charge with a current support contract. Licenses between PS and SC series do not transfer and a Replication license is needed for the SC Series.

(1) Net usable capacity of Dell array with 5 years of support, after 5:1 data reduction, vs. major competitors net of data reduction. Pricing is based on a variety of sources including analyst data, price sheets when available, and public information as of May 2016.
(2) Source: Dell internal analysis, March 2016. Net effective capacity after applying a 5:1 compression and deduplication ratio. Customer’s price may vary based on a variety of circumstances and data should be used for comparison purposes.
(3) Source: Dell internal testing, March, 2016. Results may vary depending on application and configuration with typical results being between 3:1 and 4:1.
(4) Initial version of web UI supports SC Series products only, PS Series support to be announced at a later date.
(5) Source: Dell internal analysis (March 23, 2016) comparing against the top 5 other vendors.