Five Innovations in the Data Storage Landscape
Moving to extend its portfolio of hybrid storage offerings, Dell today unveiled a set of storage arrays that make use of dual controllers to provide access to as much as five petabytes of data.
Priced starting at $14,000 and designed to fit in a 2u rack, the Dell Storage SCv2000 Series is now the entry level of the Dell storage lineup. Features supported in the SCv2000 series include data protection, RAID tiering, thin provisioning, flash support, data-migration services and multi-protocol connectivity.
Meanwhile, new iSCSI-based PS6610 Series arrays make use of 10G Ethernet and the controllers to deliver I/O performance that Alan Atkinson, vice president and general manager for Dell Storage, says are seven times faster than the previous generation of Dell EqualLogic storage arrays while also providing three and half times the capacity.
Dell also released Dell EqualLogic PS Series Array Software 8.0, which adds support for VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes to the company’s software for managing compression of snapshots and replicas.
Finally, Dell announced Dell Storage with Microsoft Storage Spaces, an implementation of its storage arrays that supports the Microsoft software-defined storage platform.
At a time when the size of customers in terms of the number of employees has little to do with the amount of data it may generate, Dell is clearly trying to bring higher-end enterprise functions into the midmarket. Of course, data storage competition across that space is nothing short of fierce, which for IT organizations faced with a need to support more data than ever on a flat budget, is never a bad thing.
