Changing the Economics of the Data Center

"Storage Center 6.4 will allow us to fully leverage SSD technology and offer the best performing hosted Exchange service and cloud servers on the market, with the lowest possible latency."

                                                                       – Jean Caron, Vice-President, Operations, at Sherweb

The Dell storage portfolio takes a major step forward with the introduction of Storage Center 6.4. This release introduces record Dell Compellent performance and density, at a price point that can change the economics of your data center. These new capabilities have received incredibly positive responses from both our customers and the marketplace as a whole as seen when announced at the Dell Enterprise Forum back in June.

As I talk to customers, they've told me that they want greater performance and higher density – all at a lower price point. We listened and now have rolled out…. 

• Flash-optimized solutions designed to improve performance for data-intensive applications and OLTP workloads, optimized with intelligent tiering to cost less than comparable 15K disk drive solutions! [1]
• New SC280 dense enclosure, the densest solution of any major vendor in its class with 336TB in 5U. [2]
• Storage Center 6.4, which optimizes performance for database & OLTP workloads, amplifies the power of Compellent tiering, and integrates management of block and file.  We've reworked our tiering logic to specifically address flash technology. 

Today, we’re releasing our Flash-optimized solutions and our SC280 dense enclosure powered by Storage Center 6.4, which helps 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. [3]

Compellent’s leading automated tiering with Data Progression has been enhanced and optimized for flash to provide built-in, extremely granular intelligence that automatically tiers data across multiple SSD types and optimizes performance all while protecting your data. This allows you to experience cost savings by migrating older files automatically down to lower-tier, less-expensive drives while writing and leaving frequently accessed data on faster, Tier 1 drives.

There is this perception that flash-optimized storage is more expensive than spinning disks. This is not the case anymore with the Dell Compellent Flash-optimized solutions that offer flash performance with up to 84% space reduction, up to 90% latency reduction and  an approximate 56% pricing reduction compared to traditional spinning arrays. [4]

Flash-optimized solutions can be configured with all SSDs for an all-flash solution, or a combination of SSDs and spinning disk drives for a hybrid-flash solution depending on your data center requirements. Compellent’s Flash-optimized solutions and data progression increase system performance by 75% and can increase storage capacity while reducing solution costs compared to arrays with spinning media. [5]

Complementary to the Flash-optimized solution we are introducing the Compellent SC280 dense enclosure which offers the best rack unit density of any major storage solution. 84 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.

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.