Dell has announced it once again is redefining the economics of the data centre and has been selected as the top choice among IT leaders for enterprise flash deployments.
Dell now offers customers better cost for storage performance as it begins to ship the new Dell Flash-optimised Solutions and dense storage enclosure. Dell’s breakthrough approach is designed to unlock customers’ greater business potential that has been limited due to the cost of high-performance flash and supporting storage environments.
Besting EMC, HP, IBM, NetApp and others by six or more percentage points, Dell is the top choice among IT leaders who have selected it as the leading vendor for deploying flash/SSDs. The results, according to an ITIC/Storage Strategies NOW survey of more than 550 global IT leaders, also show that 32% of respondents currently use or have definitive plans to deploy flash/SSD technologies.
“The adoption of performance-intensive applications for big data analytics and process transactions provides organisations the opportunity to operate faster, make better informed decisions and improve customer service, but meeting the performance demands can be costly,” says Bradley Pulford, Enterprise lead at Dell South Africa.
“Dell is the only major vendor that has found a way to offer all-flash solutions at the economics of disk. 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.
“We see this as a game-changing approach for customers and the industry.”
Dell Compellent Flash-optimised Solutions offer the industry’s first product in its class with intelligent data tiering across multiple types of flash technologies or in combination with traditional drives.
Dell’s groundbreaking approach allows customers to place all hot data for IOPS-hungry applications — such as Oracle, SQL, SAP, VDI, big data and private cloud deployments — on flash in order to process more transactions faster while lowering the overall costs to be comparable with traditional disk storage.
The Dell Compellent all-flash solution costs less than a comparable 15K disk drive solution, benefiting from enhanced automated tiering capabilities with built-in, highly granular intelligence that automatically tiers data and optimises performance.
With this advanced feature of Dell Compellent Storage Center 6.4, available at no additional cost for customers with active contracts, the Dell Flash-optimised Solutions first writes data to high-performance, high-reliability flash (SLC) drives. As data ages, it is automatically moved to a second tier of lower-cost, higher-capacity flash (MLC) drives, and finally to low-cost, capacity-based hard disks.
This tiered approach, combining different levels of flash with traditional disk-based storage, offers cost reductions up to 80% compared to all-flash arrays that don’t similarly optimise for cost or performance.
The Dell Compellent Flash-optimised Solutions supports high performance and data-intensive workloads with full enterprise-class features, and when tiering among dual flash drive types and spinning disks, organisations can achieve:
* Smaller footprints – reducing rack space by up to 84%;
* Improved performance – reducing latency by up to 90%; and
* Reduced costs – reducing the solution cost by approximately 56% compared to traditional spinning arrays.
“As a market leader in enterprise cloud services, we have stayed ahead of the curve and experienced tremendous growth globally by working closely with partners such as Dell. Compellent storage has played a critical role in helping us to meet the stringent SLA requirements the enterprise market demands,” says Dante Orsini, senior VP, business development, Houston-based iland.
“For our customers running database software and other performance-intensive applications, the Compellent Flash-optimised solution enables us to quickly support these demands in the most cost-effective manner, which is a key part of our winning formula for anticipating the rapidly changing needs of our customers in today’s dynamic environment.”
While performance-intensive applications benefit from flash performance, the rapid growth of unstructured data, such as audio, video and image files, has led to a demand for the most cost-effective ways to keep large amounts of data online and accessible.
Dell today also is shipping the Dell Compellent SC280 dense enclosure, which offers the best rack unit density of any major storage solution with up to 2,8 times more capacity than competing 2U 3,5” disk drive enclosures.
The Dell Compellent SC280 can be used in one solution that tiers data from high-performance flash drives down to high-capacity, cost-optimised storage within a single Dell Compellent array.
With this combination, addressing both ends of the storage spectrum, IT leaders can now cost-efficiently support business goals, deliver better data insights, and devote more resources to developing new innovations and services for priorities such as attracting and retaining customers.
With capacity of up to 336Tb of hard drives in a 5U enclosure, the dense enclosure maximises floor space and creates an all-in-one, fast-write, bulk storage solution for co-location environments or file workflows, such as radiology, life sciences and media archival.