Dell EqualLogic Now With SAS and SSD Drives in a Single Enclosure

Highlights of the new offering from Dell:

• Open and modular technology solutions help maximize flexibility for customers who want to innovate without lock-in
• New Business Ready Configurations help reduce cost and complexity by combining technologies in pre-configured bundles
• New products integrate seamlessly into Dell solutions for government, healthcare and education organizations
• New technology solutions, services and management functionality across servers, storage and networking enable customers to reallocate resources from maintenance to drive value and innovation

Customers in the ‘Virtual Era’ demand IT solutions that drive efficiency, rapidly deliver business value and drive innovation without locking organizations into proprietary technology. Harnessing more than 25 years of expertise in meeting customers’ requirements, Dell unveiled new technology, services, management tools and business ready solutions that preserve choice and help customers reduce the time required to build, manage and maintain an efficient datacenter.

Building off its industry-leading position and partnerships in storage, servers, networking and services, Dell has pre-integrated the product hardware and systems management capabilities critical to deploying and running various data center elements as a holistic solution. This approach is designed to deliver significant efficiencies in both OPEX and CAPEX – and deliver on Dell’s mission to reduce budget devoted to maintaining the status quo and increasing investment in innovative projects.

As customers look to streamline data center operations, the combination of next-generation storage platforms and intelligent infrastructure compute models is becoming increasingly important. New Dell EqualLogic storage products, Dell PowerConnect networking solutions and Dell PowerEdge blade servers, all built on industry-standards, plus new Dell Storage, Virtualization and Support Services, drive organizational and application agility – so customers can focus on innovation as opposed to basic maintenance.

Dell Business Ready Configurations
To help customers more quickly deploy fully integrated virtualization-ready data center solutions, Dell introduced six new Business Ready Configurations. Business Ready Configurations help customers reduce the complexity and trial and error involved in deploying virtualization projects by bringing together best-of-breed server, storage, networking, and virtualization technologies in pre-configured and validated bundles to ensure fast deployments. These solutions integrate with a customer’s existing infrastructure while allowing them to rapidly accelerate the benefits of virtualization using either VMware or Microsoft hypervisors. From customers just starting to deploy virtualized infrastructure for consolidation to the more mature customers looking for high availability, dynamic provisioning and disaster recovery capabilities, Dell has a solution.

Dell’s new server, storage, networking products and services include:

Dell EqualLogic and Dell PowerVault Storage Platforms

• New Dell EqualLogic PS6000XVS and PS6010XVS storage arrays combine the advantages of SAS and SSD drives in a single enclosure to improve density and performance. An extension of Dell’s expertise in automated load-balancing and data movement technologies, customers leveraging the EqualLogic 5.0 firmware can now benefit from automated data tiering within the new arrays.
• New advancements in the Dell EqualLogic software architecture dramatically improves the performance and scalability of EqualLogic storage arrays – all at no additional cost to new or existing EqualLogic customers. With the introduction of EqualLogic 5.0 firmware, VMware infrastructures can dramatically reduce SAN network traffic for the copy process by over 95% and CPU utilization for the copy process by over 75%[Based on testing performed by Dell Labs in May 2010 comparing Dell EqualLogic Firmware v. 4.3 to Dell EqualLogic Firmware v. 5.0 with VMware API for Array Integration. Actual performance will vary based on configuration, usage and manufacturing variability].
• New Dell PowerVault MD3200 and PowerVault MD3200i storage arrays are ideal for small-to-medium sized businesses looking for an affordable, high performance virtualization platform. The MD3200 series of storage arrays provides up to two times the performance, host support and capacity scalability over the previous generation of products.

        
EqualLogic PS6010XVS

PowerEdge Servers and Systems Management Capabilities

Dell is introducing two new PowerEdge blades and one rack server built to help customers improve virtualization performance, flexibility and power efficiency.

• The PowerEdge M710HD blade server is designed and optimized for virtual workloads and offers users tremendous I/O flexibility, high memory density, and robust Intel Xeon processing power. It is one of the only high density, memory optimized blade servers in the industry that supports failsafe redundant embedded hypervisors and hot-swappable SAS or SSD drive options to help ensure customers’ consolidated workloads stay up and running.
• The PowerEdge M610x brings a new set of capabilities to Dell’s blade portfolio and provides customers database acceleration and expanded graphics capabilities by integrating powerful PCIe solutions like NVIDIA’s new Tesla ‘Fermi’ class GPGPUs or Fusion-IO’s ioDrive Duo. + NVIDIA Tesla 20-series GPGPUs can produce the computational horsepower of an equivalent non-GPGPU quad-core CPU clusters at approximately 1/10th the cost using about 1/20th the power
• The PowerEdge R715 is an AMD-based 2U rack server that balances 24 processing cores with a large memory footprint to achieve a good ratio of price/performance. This rack server is ideal for virtualization, workload consolidation and small scale database and network infrastructure deployments.
• The M1000e chassis is enhanced with next generation power supplies, ultra-efficient fans, and ‘bare metal’ chassis management tools to help facilitate blade energy efficiency and exceptional performance per watt, as well as setting new standards for usability and manageability.
• Dell also introduced new systems management updates to its Lifecycle Controller, Chassis Management Controller and Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) offerings to help customers streamline ongoing maintenance tasks to reduce costs and improve efficiency. New enhancements include: Lifecycle Controller can automatically configure new parts with settings and firmware of prior components and a new dynamic graphical user interface comes with CMC including a homepage designed to simplify and speed up the most frequent system administrator tasks .

Dell PowerConnect Networking Solutions

Dell is introducing the PowerConnect-J series of products, the first through Dell’s OEM agreement with Juniper, and other new networking products.

• The PowerConnect J-Series EX8200 family provides a new scalable chassis solution for high performance switching and routing in data center and cloud environments.
• For smaller data center and branch office environments, the PowerConnect J-Series EX4200 family of switches leverages Virtual Chassis technology to help customers stack and manage up to ten EX4200 switches as a single device.
• The PowerConnect J-Series SRX family of Service Gateway products target a broad range of security needs including content security, access control and state-of-the-art firewall and virtual private network (VPN) technology.
• Based on Dell’s OEM agreement with Brocade, the PowerConnect B-Series RX-16 extends the current family of Dell PowerConnect B-RX chassis switches with a 16-slot, modular chassis to deliver performance and scalability for demanding networks with 10GbE requirements.
• The Dell PowerConnect 8024 Ethernet switch delivers 24 ports of 10GBASE-T and features Layer 3 routing for data center, aggregation and unified fabric deployments.

Dell Services
Dell unveiled new storage, virtualization and support services to provide the expertise needed to reduce the expense and time required to build, manage and maintain an efficient datacenter.

• Data Management Consulting Services for EqualLogic help accelerate the integration of the EqualLogic PS series into the data center, and enables customers to get the most out of their Enterprise class iSCSI SAN in terms of performance for application, data protection strategies and total cost of ownership.
• Dell ProSupport Proactive Maintenance for EqualLogic helps customers avoid problems before they occur. Through scheduled assessments, streamlined patch management and detailed reporting, Proactive Maintenance removes some of the burden of routine IT maintenance, allowing IT personnel to focus on more innovative projects.
• Dell Virtualization Consulting that helps drive out inefficiency through standardization, reducing complexity through application rationalization, consolidation, virtualization and automation.

All Dell PowerEdge, EqualLogic and PowerVault products and solutions mentioned are available through Dell or any of the company’s approximately 60,000 Global PartnerDirect channel partners.

Availability

• The Dell EqualLogic PS6000XVS and EqualLogic PS6010XVS will be available in early August. The EqualLogic 5.0 firmware is available today at no additional charge to existing or new EqualLogic customers.
• The Dell PowerVault MD3200, PowerVault MD3200i and PowerConnect 8024 are available next week.
• The Dell PowerEdge M610x, PowerEdge M710HD and PowerEdge R715 will be available in July.
• The Dell PowerConnect-J series of network offerings will be available in July.
• The Dell PowerConnect B-RX16 will be available in early August.

“Dell continues to reinvent itself and stress the importance of open, capable and affordable IT products and services,” said IDC analyst Matt Eastwood, Group Vice President, Server Platforms. “The company is wise to adopt a balanced approach to leverage private cloud opportunity driven from virtualization and other transformational IT initiatives. Their vision is clean, understandable and believable and IDC expects that it will resonate well in the market as customers evaluate their IT infrastructure options in the months to come.”

“Organizations benefit from Dell’s approach to open, capable and affordable technologies that preserve choice and free up budgets for innovation and today we are introducing several new product and solution offerings to reinforce that direction,” said Brad Anderson, senior vice president, Enterprise Product Group, Dell. “With new solutions for virtualization management, new innovations in our server and storage product lines and expanded service offerings our customers can utilize Dell for the benefits of a converged architecture – dynamic workload allocation, faster time to deployment, seamless management – but they don’t want to be locked into a closed technology stack.”