Dell PowerVault ME5 Series Scalable Storage Solutions for SMB Workloads

By Shannon Champion, VP product marketing, primary storage, HCI and CI, Dell Technologies, Inc.

Dell Technologies, Inc. unleashed PowerVault ME5, a series of 3 entry storage models that are purpose-built and optimized for SAN and DAS and poised to address a range of SMB challenges.

This includes keeping pace with data growth, improving operational simplicity, supporting newer and higher value workloads and delivering business outcomes faster. PowerVault ME5 does this with a software design that offers 2x the performance, throughput, capacity and memory of its PowerVault ME4 predecessor. It is set to help SMBs boost productivity and economic growth by improving their access to data and staying competitive.

The company’s sales and channel artners have catapulted Dell into a leadership position within the entry storage segment with over 53,000 systems spread over more than 26,000 satisfied PowerVault customers. This success can be credited to its legacy of knowing how to design cost-efficient solutions that can address numerous SMB challenges of storage growth, management simplicity, performance and data protection. Technology investments coupled with an understanding of the customer’s business needs enables the vendor to balance performance and cost for price conscious SMBs.

“Dell PowerVault ME5 provides our resellers with significant refresh revenue while our customers will realize significant performance, capacity and throughput gains helping them achieve their business goals,” says Jörg Eilenstein, COO, TIM AG.

PowerVault ME5012, ME5024, ME5084 models

PowerVault storage has brought customers an all-inclusive experience of simplified operations, PowerEdge Server compatibility, rich data services, performance and cloud-based storage analytics. One of the reasons IT organizations will find PowerVault ME5 storage attractive is the management simplicity that starts with PowerVault Manager – a single ME5 array management (HTML5) GUI with intuitive user navigation and supported scripting with either a Redfish/Swordfish REST or CLI APIs. PowerVault ME5 is also supported within Dell’s Open Management Enterprise (OME) framework that’s useful when PowerVault is installed alongside Dell networks, servers and other firm’s infrastructure in a data center. Finally, customers with ProSupport Services for PowerVault ME5 can access CloudIQ at no additional cost. CloudIQ is Dell’s cloud-based AIO/s that uses telemetry, ML and other algorithms to provide users with notifications and predictive analytics indicating the operational health of the array, remediation advice, anomalies, capacity projections, reclaimable storage and more.

PowerVault ME5’s design is suited to support a set of application workloads including HPC file systems with BeeGFS, PixStore and NFS file systems, safety and security (CCTV at the Edge), Microsoft and VMware Virtualization, up to 500 virtual desktops, select edge use cases (oil and gas exploration and cloud gaming) and more without compromising performance or availability SLAs. PowerVault ME5 is also well suited for OEM with its OEM-ready design. Many OEM customers want to utilize the Dell branding in their PowerVault based solutions, while others either require a de-branded solution or a rebranded ME5 with their own brand. While PowerVault ME5 can be configured as an AFA, SMB customers appreciate that ME5 is an affordable hybrid storage choice for any of these application environments that don’t demand the low latencies of all-flash and NVMe – yet still necessitate important availability, reliability and security characteristics.

Now, with the availability of PowerVault ME5 with valid configurations starting at $12,000, entry storage has been powerful, scalable and economical.

Resources:
PowerVault ME5012 Storage Array    
PowerVault ME5024 Storage Array     
PowerVault ME5084 Storage Array