Dell Mid-Tier Flash RAID Series “Costing 72% Less Than Competing Arrays”

Dell, Inc. will bring its high-end storage capabilities to mid-sized deployments with the creation of a new series of full-featured enterprise storage arrays.

Dell also shared details of its growing software-defined storage (SDS) ecosystem and plans to broaden its portfolio with new converged server and storage appliances.

New Dell Storage SC4000 Series arraysdemonstrate Dell’s innovation to bring full-featured, enterprise storage to cost-efficient, performing, mid-tier solutions.

With these new arrays, customers can achieve all-flash performance – costing up to 72% less than competing pure flash arrays (1) – or a cost-efficient combination of high-end flash performance and low-cost disk storage all in one array. The storage array series joins Dell’s customer-driven, enterprise data centre portfolio of purpose-built solutions designed to make IT more efficient and practical.

“The Dell Storage SC4000 Series is redefining the economics of enterprise storage, offering the advanced capabilities of larger-scale enterprise storage and outstanding price for performance to help customers with mid-tier storage needs become more competitive,” said Alan Atkinson, VP and GM, Dell storage. “While Dell continues to make huge strides in evolving our storage portfolio with industry leading value propositions for customers seeking innovative SAN technology, we’re also supporting organisations opting for a revolutionary approach to data management by growing our portfolio of software-defined storage and converged solutions.”

Dell Storage Arrays Bring
Large-Scale, Enterprise Features to Smaller Deployments
Supporting customers seeking high-performing and cost-efficient storage arrays at a smaller scale, the SC4000 Series arrays will debut with the enterprise SC4020, a 2U, 24-drive SAN. These enterprise arrays leverage technology from both the Dell Compellent and EqualLogic family of products, incorporating Dell Storage Center 6.5 array software and the EqualLogic iSCSI software stack. The new series supports both FC and iSCSI connectivity and is designed to offer the same capabilities as larger SANs in a solution sized and priced for mid-sized deployments.

The SC4020, which can scale to more than 400TB of raw capacity, supports a range of workloads for organisations, across all industries and sizes, seeking a performing, mid-sized SAN entry point or a remote or branch office storage solution. For example, the SC4020 can host up to 10,000 Exchange 2013 user mailboxes in a single 2U SAN with 24 HDD drives or can achieve nearly 120,000 IO/s with less than one millisecond latency for OLTP or mixed workloads.3

The new arrays will launch with the same intelligent data placement capability as the Compellent SC8000 that moves data among traditional rotating drives, write-optimised flash (SLC), and read-optimised flash (MLC) drives to optimise overall storage costs. Customers can achieve all-flash performance for the price of 15K disk technology (2) with real time tiering between flash drive types, thereby reducing storage costs and gaining from all-flash performance to support applications, such as OLTP database workloads, where previously all-flash storage might have been deemed cost prohibitive.

The SC4020 also provides a replication partner for the Compellent SC8000 arrays, allowing customers to connect and manage arrays together with a single, centralised management interface that can help simplify operations and reduce TCO.

The new Dell Storage array series also offers customers:

• Efficient SAN and compact size, making it for mid-sized needs or remote or branch office deployments
• Enterprise performance with dual controller capability and SAN optimised for all-flash or hybrid SSD/HDD configurations
• Intelligence with levels of automation and control to auto-tune the customer’s storage environment
• Software capabilities such as real-time automated tiering, replication, thin provisioning, snapshots and centralised management for multiple local and remote SANs
• Perpetual software licensing that enables customers to pay only once for software features, even across hardware upgrades
• Unified storage with the ability to manage both block and file storage, with the Dell Fluid File System, from a single management console
• Dell Copilot support services that provide a combination of centralised support and 24×7 active system monitoring to help improve system performance and stability

Growing SDS Portfolio
Dell also announced growing support for a diverse set of SDS solutions, broadening its partner ecosystem with a new go to market relationship with Nutanix, Inc.www.nutanix.com. With thhis agreement, Dell plans to offer customers the Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances, which combine compute, storage and networking into a single offering, powered by Nutanix software. The new appliances will benefit customers seeking an integrated IT approach, offering simple deployment, management and scale as needed.

As SDS begins to find its way into the enterprise storage and the larger software-defined data centre discussions, some organisations are looking to move towards solutions where the components – compute, storage and networking – are tuned to work together for optimised application performance and ease of management and scale through automation and IT orchestration.

With a focus on delivering end-to-end data centre capabilities, Dell offers customers multiple SDS options, along with its partners, where Dell hardware, services and support are integral to the solutions. Dell’s broad and open approach to SDS includes integration with open source platforms and leading hypervisor vendors to provide a breadth of customer-centric SDS solutions to address various business needs.

Availability:

• The SC4000 Series will be available worldwide during the third quarter of 2014.
• The XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances have planned worldwide availability during the fourth quarter of 2014.

“Dell has excelled historically as an innovator that brings full-featured storage capabilities to lower price points, helping the vast majority of storage customers to benefit from advanced features previously only available to the largest storage deployments,” said Arun Taneja, founder and president, Taneja Group. “With the,ll S,e SC4000 Series, Dell brings all of these capabilities, such as intelligent tiering, thin provisioning and snapshots, to a new breed of customers. The new array series will offer immense value for storage users while also providing a brand new market opportunity for Dell Storage growth.”

“As an existing Dell Compellent SC8000 customer, we see the Dell Storage SC4020 as an excellent fit for our remote locations, allowing us to replicate digital media and large documents back to home base,” said Ryan Hayes, IT manager, Park City Mountain Resort. “Te SC4000wil allow us to get even greater value out of our existing Dell Storage environment with a smaller entry point that offers the same ease of installation, ease of use and enterprise functionality.”

“Dells plans to deliver new appliances with Nutanix software is a very compelling offering for customers seeking a web-scale, converged approach to IT,” said Ashish Nadkarni, research director, IDC’s storage practice. “Dell is the first major IT vendor to embrace web-scale in this manner by partnering with Nutanix, a known leader in the space that offers ease of deployment and management for customers interested in a converged server and storage solution that simply scales as needed.”

“This agreement with Dell highlights our shared commitment to disrupt traditional data centre architectures and accelerate the adoption of web-scale infrastructure in the enterprise,” said Dheeraj Pandey, co-founder and CEO, Nutanix, Inc. “Dell is the right partner to leverage our software-driven technology, and introduce powerful converged infrastructure appliances with a wide range of price and performance options geared toward supporting a variety of critical enterprise workloads.”

(1) Source: Based on Dell analysis of competitive US list pricing comparing $/GB from Gartner Inc., CP Storage, as of May 27, 2014.
(2) Based on internal Dell analysis performed in February 2014, based on Dell Storage SC4020 all-flash and 15K spinning disk list pricing for workload requirements in the range 16,000-20,000 IO/s for OLTP databases with less than 36TB of raw storage.
(3) Based on Dell internal testing at Dell labs using IOmeter and Exchange 2013 JetStress toolkits in Spring 2014. Exchange 2013 and OLTP or mixed workload performance shown is not indicative of the maximum SC4020 performance. SC4020 performance will vary depending upon workload I/O profile and SC4020 drive and I/O port configuration.