Dell Datacenter Scalable Solutions

Dell, Inc. announced solutions and services designed to help large-scale datacenter customers achieve mission-critical business goals faster and more consistently with less cost and downtime.

Travis Vigil, executive director, Dell Storage, with SC9000 array controllers
and expansion enclosures in Dell’s Austin, Texas, lab.
The Dell SC9000 and supporting Storage Center 6.7 array software
represent company’s performing SC Series arrays.

The company helps customers with infrastructures that can scale easily and adapt quickly now and into the future with new servers designed specifically for the fastest growing datacenter market, new highest-end enterprise storage arrays and hyperconverged appliances, next-generation data protection software, and new IT deployment and automation services.

“With today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, Dell focuses on designing datacenter solutions that offer market-leading performance and have the agility and flexibility to keep pace with new workloads and demands, changing architectures and business growth,” said Marius Haas, chief commercial officer and president, commercial sales and enterprise solutions, Dell. “The new solutions and services announced demonstrate the ability to scale simply and cost-effectively, allowing large-scale customers to reap the benefits of intelligently designed solutions that reduce total cost of IT ownership and shift the prioritization of resources from day-to-day IT management to higher-value services that help achieve business results and support growth.“

“The proliferation of digital technologies is quickly driving IT organizations to transform their infrastructure and partner more closely with business counterparts to deliver greater insights and value necessary to help improve customer experiences,” said Matt Eastwood, SVP, enterprise infrastructure and data center, IDC. “Dell has a good pulse on the needs of its customers and is investing in and developing the right set of 3rd Platform-based technologies and solutions. This will be critical to help meet the needs for increased utilization rates and productivity requirements of the digital economy.“

DSS branded products

DSS-branded Servers
Formally announced in August 2015, company’s Datacenter Scalable Solutions (DSS) is a new line of business within Enterprise Solutions organization designed to meet the specific needs of web tech, telecommunications service providers, hosting companies, oil and gas, and research organizations. After engaging with over 200 customers in this growing market, the company is responding to their needs by introducing its first DSS-branded products that provide great versatility and scale while reducing infrastructure costs.

DSS 7000

The DSS 7000 is a dense storage server built to meet the storage needs of an exascale future. Building on its hyperscale leadership, the new storage server is based on the DCS XA90 and is capable of delivering up to 720TB of storage in a single 4U chassis. The DSS 7000 packs up to 90 hot-serviceable 3.5-inch drives and two 2-socket server nodes to provide cloud builders with a low dollar-per-gigabyte cost for object and block storage.

DCS XA90

The DDSS 1500, DSS 1510 and DSS 2500 are 1U and 2U servers that have been purpose-built to provide this set of customers with the technology they need for their specific workload needs. Featuring a minimalistic design, flexible storage and IO options, industry-standard baseboard management controller (BMC) systems management and the latest Xeon processors, these DSS servers help customers maximize operational efficiency while providing performance.

SC9000

Highest-End Storage Arrays and Industry-Leading All-Flash Cost-per-Gigabyte
The combination of company’s SC9000 storage array controller, 12Gb SAS expansion enclosures and next generation array software offers customers the highest-performing, most enterprise-focused SC Series release to date. The company once again offers the industry’s lowest cost-per-gigabyte for SSD storage ⁽¹⁾ with enterprise SC9000 all-flash arrays as low as 65 cents (US)-per-gigabyte net effective capacity including the array, all storage software and three years of company’s Copilot support.⁽³⁾

The SC9000, based on company’s 13th generation PowerEdge server platform, offers all-flash and hybrid flash configurations and delivers 40% more IO/s-with the ability to achieve more than 385,000 IO/s ⁽⁴⁾ -and more than double the throughput ⁽⁵⁾ compared to previous SC Series arrays. Supporting the most demanding large-scale workloads, the flexible and self-optimizing SC9000 provides more than 3PB of raw capacity per array and scales-out even further in federated multi-array configurations with seamless volume movement among arrays.

The company’s Center 6.7 array software offers substantial enterprise enhancements, boosting overall SC Series support for private clouds and other mission-critical applications. Highlighted new capabilities include Live Volume auto-failover for built-in DR with zero workload downtime and integrated host-side data protection for Oracle, Microsoft and VMware environments. New active data compression capabilities offer up to 93% flash capacity savings ⁽⁶⁾, and innovations, such as the deployment of TLC 3D NAND technology in an high-performance, high-endurance setting, provide further cost savings.

Data Protection|Rapid Recovery software
Click to enlarge

Ushers in next generation of backup and recovery with Data Protection|Rapid Recovery
Next-generation Data Protection|Rapid Recovery software, engineered in the cloud era with cloud recovery in mind, integrates proven and familiar features of AppAssure and other leading Dell IP designed to eliminate downtime for customer environments.

Rapid Recovery features ‘Rapid Snap for Applications’ technology that can capture an entire application and its relevant state, enabling complete application and system recovery with near-zero RTOs and aggressive RPOs. A new ‘Rapid Snap for Virtual’ capability, based on company’s vRanger technology, provides scalable protection of growing VMware environments without agents, and automatically detects and backups VMs provisioned on an ESXi host. In addition, a simple bare metal restore (BMR) feature from cloud-based archives reinforces the company’s ongoing focus on powerful cloud connectivity and recovery. The solution features a Rapid Recovery Repository (R3) with encryption and client-side deduplication based on proven Rapid Data Access (RDA) technology. R3 delivers direct-to-target backups and reduces the deduplication workload, resulting in quicker snapshots, reduced data transfer times, and greater scale.

Rapid Recovery Dashboard summary table

The company is expanding its capability around endpoint protection by delivering the first release of Data Protection|Endpoint Recovery, a software solution with proven IP to deliver continuous backup and fast, easy endpoint recovery. Complementing this releases, the company is offering simplified pricing for vRanger, giving organizations with growing virtual environments access to a scalable VM backup solution starting at $699 including 24/7 support.

XC Series

Next wave of DXC Series appliances expand company’s Software-Defined Storage portfolio
The company announced the next wave of XC Series of web-scale converged appliances, which integrate compute, storage and hypervisor resources into a single offering to help reduce TCO and streamline datacenters. These appliances help company’s support the growing customer interest in hyperconverged solutions where spending is expected to grow by almost 60% CAGR from 2014 to 2019, reaching a total of $3.9 billion by 2019, according to IDC.⁽⁷⁾

The latest hyperconverged solutions include the XC6320, the highest-density XC Series appliance to-date, with four compute nodes that support more than 44TB in a 2U form factor. This substantially reduces datacenter hardware rack space, power and cooling required to run various workloads in service provider, ROBO and large customer datacenters. New XC630-10F and XC6320-6F all-flash nodes are the first XC series all-flash appliances, offering a cost-for-performance boost with data tiering between flash drives types based on actual data usage.

ProDeploy enterprise suite gets more out of technology starting day one
The company’s ProDeploy Enterprise Suite includes three deployment services and full training and certification to help secure the path to a future-ready data center. The ProDeploy Plus, a complete deployment service, rapidly integrates new technologies and optimizes the long-term performance of critical systems. Expert deployment means customers are able to deploy up to 39% faster ⁽²⁾ and save up to $2,000 per deployed device ⁽⁸⁾.

For channel partners, the company offers the flexibility to deliver, resell and co-deliver deployment services. Through new training and certifications, customers and partners gain the same storage and networking expertise as company’s certified engineers. By reselling company’s deployment services, partners can expand their capacity and cover the globe by supplementing their capabilities. PartnerDirect premier and preferred partners can earn a deployment services competency to access company’s methodologies and tools while becoming eligible to co-deliver ProDeploy with Dell.

Dell Services introduces Application Modernization portfolio
As customers look to move to new data center technologies, they also need to re-host or re-architect their applications. Dell Services today introduced the Application Modernization portfolio, a set of integrated software solutions for application modernization and simplification. The Application Modernization Portfolio helps customers more easily enhance business agility through application simplification, place their applications in secure solutions to address vulnerabilities, and integrate applications with digital services.

Unifying these solutions in a common framework enables Dell Services to address customers’ complex legacy challenges with fit-to-purpose hybrid approaches. It can apply the right solution and modernization technique to each diverse challenge in a real-world legacy portfolio, instead of trying to fit every problem to a one-trick solution.

Availability:

• Datacenter Scalable Solutions DSS 7000, 1510, 1500 and 2500 are available globally.

• Storage SC9000, Storage Center 6.7 and Storage SC400 and SC420 enclosures are available globally.

• Data Protection|Rapid Recovery will be available worldwide in Q4 starting at $1,199 and is available as a free upgrade for AppAssure license holders.

• The XC6320 highest-density appliance is available globally, and the XC630-10F and XC6320-6F All-Flash Nodes have planned global availability in November 2015.

• The ProDeploy Enterprise Suite services are available on Dell server, storage and networking products in 55 countries and the Deployment Services Competency is available in 123 countries.

• The Application Modernization portfolio is available globally as part of company’s Services’ Application Modernization solutions.

⁽¹⁾ Dell offers the lowest street price on a $/usableGB basis for all-flash storage arrays compared to major storage vendors. Pricing is based on a variety of sources including analyst data, price sheets when available, and public information in October 2015. Individual customer’s price may vary based on a variety of circumstances and data should be used for comparison purposes.
⁽²⁾ Based on Deploying New Dell Solutions with Dell Deployment Services, a Principled Technologies Test Report commissioned by Dell.
⁽³⁾ Street pricing is based on a variety of sources, including analyst data, price sheets when available, and public information. Any individual customer’s price may vary based on a variety of circumstances, and data should be used for comparison. Net effective capacity is after applying a 2.5x compression ratio. Customer results may vary depending on application and configuration.
⁽⁴⁾ Based on Dell internal testing in August 2015 on dual SC9000 controllers with SCOS 6.7 using IOmeter. 100% reads, 100% sequential load, with 8K sector transfer size. Actual performance will vary based on configuration and usage and manufacturing variability.
⁽⁵⁾ Based on Dell internal testing in August 2015 of the SC9000 with 12Gb SAS expansion enclosures and drives vs. SC8000 with 6Gb SAS equivalent. Tests were performed using sequential writes on standard Dell SSDs. Actual performance will vary based on configuration, usage and manufacturing variability.
⁽⁶⁾ Based on Dell internal testing in August 2015. Best case results for SQL application data. Customer results may vary depending on application and configuration.
⁽⁷⁾ IDC Worldwide Hyperconverged Systems 2015-2019 Forecast, Doc # 255614, April 2015.
⁽⁸⁾ Source: IDC white paper, sponsored by Dell, Growing Business Value by Utilizing Deployment Services, September 2015. Full report found here.