Earlier this year at the Dell Enterprise Forum in San Jose, we announced new products and solutions designed to fundamentally change the economics of storage in the datacenter. With the introduction of our new Dell Compellent Flash-optimized Solutions, customers have come to us to plan the re-invention of their approach to storage, moving their businesses to a faster performing set of solutions that enable applications and operations to be more responsive and higher performing while providing greater return on the investments for their organizations.
Flash technology is at the heart of the enterprise storage evolution. Based on its significant performance advantages, flash has had slower adoption than market and application requirements would due to cost. Today, we are excited to announce that we have begun to ship our Dell Flash-Optimized solutions. Our new all-flash solution is designed to support customer demands at a price point that can significantly change the economics of your data center. You no longer have to choose between capacity and performance. You can have both without breaking your bank.
Dell now can offer you a full-featured, 100 percent flash storage solution at a price comparable to a 15K spinning disk storage array. Our breakthrough approach is designed to unlock your greater business potential that has been limited previously due to the costs of high-performance flash and supporting storage environments.
Our new Dell Compellent Flash-optimized Solutions further strengthen our position as a leader in offering customers innovative flash technologies. It’s great to know Dell is already top of mind with customers worldwide. When 550 global IT leaders were asked by Storage Strategies NOW which vendor they use or plan to use for deploying flash, Dell was number one – with more than 30 percent of respondents choosing our company ahead of EMC, HP, IBM, NetApp.
Traditionally more expensive than hard disk drives, flash storage is better suited for hot, IOPS-intensive data because it handles data at a much faster rate. Dell is the only major vendor that has found a way to offer flash solutions at the economics of rotating disks. 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.
Our Dell Compellent Flash-optimized solutions and our SC280 dense enclosure powered by Storage Center 6.4, help you manage your expanding storage needs while preserving your capital for sales, marketing and R&D. Storage Center 6.4, is the first storage solution in its class to tier sub-LUN data across traditional rotating drives, write-optimized SSDs and read-optimized SSDs.2
We’ve made substantial updates to Compellent’s industry leading automated tiering specifically for flash. Our arrays have been enhanced and optimized for flash to provide built-in, highly granular intelligence that automatically tiers multiple flash drive types at optimal cost while not sacrificing performance. As a result, we are redefining the economics of flash storage and making flash available to customers where it may have been cost-prohibitive in the past with the Dell Compellent all-flash solution that actually costs less than a comparable 15K disk drive solution.3
Not only does our automated tiering support tiering between flash types, but it also continues to support tiering between flash and traditional spinning disks. This allows are new flash solution to be combined with tradition disk based solutions to achieve a remarkable breakthrough in both performance and density and a remarkable price point.
Complementary to the Flash-optimized solution, we now are shipping the Dell Compellent SC280 dense enclosure, which offers the best rack unit density of any major storage solution. Eighty-four 4TB hard drives in a 5 rack unit (RU) space allows for 67.2TB usable per rack unit, clearly maximizing floor space and creating an all-in-one fast write, bulk storage solution. You can now have 2PB of storage along with 2 Compellent Storage Center systems in a 48U rack. The SC280 can be used in a solution that tiers data from high-performance, Flash-optimized solutions with SLC and MLC SSD all the way down to high-capacity, cost-optimized storage—all within a single Compellent array.
Together, these benefits help organizations run their applications — such as software handling data warehousing or online customer purchasing — as fast as the business demands while balancing overall cost and performance requirements. With these new capabilities, we have truly broken the capacity vs. performance trade-off. You now can have both.
Are you utilizing flash solutions in your data center? Let us know how through your comments and be sure to stay connected with Dell Storage via Facebook and Twitter.
1 Source: Storage Strategies NOW, “Enterprise Use Cases for Solid State Storage,” August 2013.
2 Based on internal Dell analysis performed in May 2012, comparing similar Dell Compellent offerings to EMC VNX family, HP 3PAR StoreServe, HP EVA, IBM v7000, IBM XIV, Hitachi Data Systems HUS 100 Family, and Oracle SUN ZFS Storage family.
3 Based on internal Dell analysis in July 2013 based on Dell Compellent flash-optimized and spinning disk US list pricing
