Dell Said All-Flash Costing Less Than 15,000rpm HDD Solution

Dell, Inc. has been selected as the top choice among IT leaders for enterprise flash deployments. (Source: Storage Strategies NOW, Enterprise Use Cases for Solid State Storage/Flash Memory, August 2013.)

It now offers customers better cost for storage performance as it begins to ship the new Dell Flash-optimized Solutions and dense storage enclosure. This approach is designed to unlock customers’ greater business potential that has been limited due to the cost of high-performance flash and supporting storage environments.

Besting EMC, HP, IBM, NetApp and others by six or more percentage points, Dell is the top choice among IT leaders who have selected it as the leading vendor for deploying flash/SSDs. The results, according to an ITIC/Storage Strategies NOW survey of more than 550 global IT leaders, also show that 32% of respondents currently use or have definitive plans to deploy flash/SSD technologies.

“The adoption of performance-intensive applications for big data analytics and process transactions provides organizations the opportunity to operate faster, make better informed decisions and improve customer service, but meeting the performance demands can be costly,” said Alan Atkinson, VP and co-GM, Dell Storage. “Dell is the only major vendor that has found a way to offer all-flash solutions at the economics of disk. Dell’s practical approach integrates flash into a fully-functional storage array and uses enterprise storage features, like tiering, replication and management, to support high-performance data demands while also offering a new level of cost-efficient density. We see this as a game-changing approach for customers and the industry.”

Economics of Enterprise Flash Storage
Dell Compellent Flash-optimized Solutions offer the first product in its class with intelligent data tiering across multiple types of flash technologies or in combination with traditional drives. (Based on internal Dell analysis performed in May 2013, comparing Dell Compellent offerings to EMC VNX Family, HP 3PAR StoreServ, HP EVA, IBM V7000, IBM XIV, Hitachi Data Systems HUS 100 Family, and Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Family)

Its approach allows customers to place all hot data for IO/s-hungry applications – such as Oracle, SQL, SAP, VDI, big data and private cloud deployments – on flash in order to process more transactions faster while lowering the overall costs to be comparable with traditional disk storage.

The Compellent all-flash solution costs less than a comparable 15K disk drive solution, benefiting from enhanced automated tiering capabilities with built-in, highly granular intelligence that automatically tiers data and optimizes performance. (Based on internal Dell analysis in July 2013 based on Compellent flash-optimized and spinning disk US list pricing)

With this feature of Dell Compellent Storage Center 6.4, available at no additional cost for customers with active contracts, the flash-optimized solutions first writes data to high-performance, high-reliability flash (SLC) drives. As data ages, it is automatically moved to a second tier of lower-cost, higher-capacity flash (MLC) drives, and finally to low-cost, capacity-based HDDs. This tiered approach, combining different levels of flash with traditional disk-based storage, offers cost reductions up to 80% compared to all-flash arrays that don’t similarly optimize for cost or performance. (By automatically tiering data across SLC and MLC SSDs, Compellent SC 6.4 flash-optimized solution can reduce costs up to 80% compared to other flash-optimized solutions. Competitive US list pricing from Gartner Inc, CP Storage, as of June 2013. Market price calculated assuming a discounting of approximately 50% for all competitive systems and Compellent)

The Compellent solutions supports high performance and data-intensive workloads with enterprise features, and when tiering among dual flash drive types and spinning disks, organizations can achieve:

• Smaller footprints – Reducing rack space by up to 84%
• Improved performance – Reducing latency by up to 90%
• Reduced costs – Reducing the solution cost by approximately 56% compared to traditional spinning arrays. (Internal Dell analysis in July 2013 based on Compellent flash-optimized and spinning disk US list pricing, technical specifications of flash-optimized vs. spinning disk arrays and an internal test performed by Dell in March 2013 with Storage Center v6.3.10 on dual SC8000 controllers running OLTP type workloads using IOmeter with a 100% random, 70/30 R/W mix and 8K sector transfer size achieved this IO/s performance. Assumption is SC 6.4 will have similar results. Actual performance/latency will vary based on configuration, usage and manufacturing variability)

“As a market leader in enterprise cloud services, we have stayed ahead of the curve and experienced tremendous growth globally by working closely with partners such as Dell. Compellent storage has played a critical role in helping us to meet the stringent SLA requirements the enterprise market demands,” said Dante Orsini, SVP, business development, Houston-based iland. “For our customers running database software and other performance-intensive applications, the Compellent Flash-optimized solution enables us to quickly support these demands in the most cost-effective manner, which is a key part of our winning formula for anticipating the rapidly changing needs of our customers in today’s dynamic environment.”

High Performance and Low Cost Storage in One Solution
While performance-intensive applications benefit from flash performance, the rapid growth of unstructured data, such as audio, video and image files, has led to a demand for the cost-effective ways to keep large amounts of data online and accessible. Dell also is shipping the Compellent SC280 dense enclosure, which offers up to 2.8 times more capacity than competing 2U 3.5″ disk drive enclosures.

The Compellent SC280 can be used in one solution that tiers data from high-performance flash drives down to high-capacity, cost-optimized storage within a single Compellent array. With this combination, addressing both ends of the storage spectrum, IT leaders can now cost-efficiently support business goals, deliver better data insights, and devote more resources to developing new innovations and services such as attracting and retaining customers.

With capacity of up to 336TB of HDDs in 5U enclosure, the dense enclosure maximizes floor space and creates an all-in-one, fast-write, bulk storage solution for co-location environments or file workflows, such as radiology, life sciences and media archival.

“Dell has put together an impressive array of SSD/flash options covering the end-to-end of its server and storage product lines,” said Deni Connor, founding analyst for Storage Strategies NOW. “Designation of an SLC Tier and an MLC Tier in the Dell Compellent Storage Center is a unique concept and allows tuning of hardware for a given workload at a new level of granularity. The new density enhancements also add immense value for keeping large amounts of data online as data center footprints become more and more expensive.”

“Dell has looked beyond the current state of the market and refuses to implement flash technology in the same manner of its contemporaries,” said Rick Gouin, CTO, Winslow Technology Group, LLC. “By tiering with lower cost read-intensive drives in an intelligent way, Dell can offer larger pools of flash storage without compromising on performance or cost. This delivers the best of both worlds for customers today while the Dell Compellent architecture is fully prepared for a future when flash drive technology moves towards greater cost parity with spinning disk.”