Additions To Dell Range Improve Support And Enable Cost-Efficient Data Centres

Dell has unveiled new solutions and services, which it says will help large-scale data centre customers achieve mission-critical business goals faster and with less cost and downtime.

The new offerings had been developed well before Dell’s move to takeover storage giant EMC, but Dell says there will be no overlap in what the two firms are doing.

The future

Dell aims to help customers with infrastructures that can scale easily and adapt quickly now and into the future with new servers designed specifically for the fastest growing data centre market, new highest-end enterprise storage arrays and hyperconverged appliances, next-generation data protection software, and new IT deployment and automation services.

Marius Haas, chief commercial officer and president of Dell Commercial Sales and Enterprise Solutions, said: “With today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, Dell focuses on designing data centre solutions that offer market-leading performance and have the agility and flexibility to keep pace with new workloads and demands, changing architectures and business growth.

“The new solutions and services announced today demonstrate the ability to scale simply and cost-effectively, allowing large-scale customers to reap the benefits of intelligently designed solutions that reduce total cost of IT ownership and shift the prioritisation of resources from day-to-day IT management to higher-value services that help achieve business results and support growth.”

Dell Introduces First Dell DSS-branded Servers

Formally announced in August 2015, Dell Datacenter Scalable Solutions (DSS) is a new line of business within Dell’s Enterprise Solutions organisation designed to meet the specific needs of web tech, telecommunications service providers, hosting companies, oil and gas, and research organisations. After engaging with over 200 customers in this growing market, Dell is responding to their needs by introducing its first DSS-branded products that provide great versatility and scale while reducing infrastructure costs.

The Dell DSS 7000 is said to be the industry’s densest storage server built to meet the storage needs of an exascale future. Building on its hyperscale leadership, the new storage server is based on the DCS XA90 and is capable of delivering up to 720 terabytes of storage in a single 4U chassis. The DSS 7000 packs up to 90 hot-serviceable 3.5-inch drives and two 2-socket server nodes to provide cloud builders with a low dollar-per-gigabyte cost for object and block storage.

The Dell DSS 1500, DSS 1510 and DSS 2500 are new 1U and 2U servers that have been purpose-built to provide this set of customers with the technology they need for their specific workload needs. Featuring a minimalistic design, flexible storage and IO options, industry-standard baseboard management controller (BMC) systems management and the latest Intel Xeon processors, these new DSS servers help customers maximise operational efficiency while providing optimal performance.

Dell Launches Highest-End Dell Storage Arrays and Industry-Leading All-Flash Cost-per-Gigabyte

The combination of Dell’s new flagship Dell Storage SC9000 storage array controller, new 12Gb SAS expansion enclosures and next generation array software offers customers the highest-performing, most enterprise-focused SC Series release to date, the company said. Dell also claims to offer the industry’s lowest cost-per-gigabyte for SSD storage1 with enterprise SC9000 all-flash arrays as low as 65 cents (US)-per-gigabyte net effective capacity including the array, all storage software and three-years of Dell Copilot support.3

The Dell Storage SC9000, based on Dell’s 13th generation PowerEdge server platform, offers all-flash and hybrid flash configurations and delivers 40 percent more IOPs –with the ability to achieve more than 385,000 IOPS4 – and more than double the throughput5 compared to previous SC Series arrays. Supporting the most demanding large-scale workloads, the flexible and self-optimising SC9000 provides more than three petabytes of raw capacity per array and scales-out even further in federated multi-array configurations with supposedly seamless volume movement among arrays.

New Dell Storage Center 6.7 array software is said to offer substantial enterprise enhancements, boosting overall SC Series support for private clouds and other mission-critical applications. Highlighted new capabilities include Live Volume auto-failover for built-in disaster recovery with zero workload downtime and integrated host-side data protection for Oracle, Microsoft and VMware environments. New active data compression capabilities offer up to 93 percent flash capacity savings6, and innovations, such as the industry-first deployment of TLC 3D NAND technology in a true high-performance, high-endurance setting, provide further cost savings, Dell said.

Dell Ushers in Next Generation of Backup and Recovery with Dell Data Protection | Rapid Recovery

Next-generation Dell Data Protection | Rapid Recovery software, engineered in the cloud era with cloud recovery in mind, integrates proven and familiar features of AppAssure and other leading Dell IP designed to eliminate downtime for customer environments.

Rapid Recovery features “Rapid Snap for Applications” technology that can capture an entire application and its relevant state, enabling complete application and system recovery with near-zero RTOs and aggressive RPOs. A new “Rapid Snap for Virtual” capability, based on Dell vRanger technology, provides scalable protection of growing VMware environments without agents, and automatically detects and backs up VMs provisioned on an ESXi host. In addition, a simple bare metal restore (BMR) feature from cloud-based archives reinforces Dell’s ongoing focus on powerful cloud connectivity and recovery. The solution also features a Rapid Recovery Repository (R3) with encryption and client-side deduplication based on proven Rapid Data Access (RDA) technology. R3 delivers direct-to-target backups and, according to Dell, significantly reduces the deduplication workload, resulting in quicker snapshots, reduced data transfer times, and greater scale.

Dell is also expanding its capability around endpoint protection by delivering the first release of Dell Data Protection | Endpoint Recovery, a new software solution with proven IP to deliver continuous backup and fast, easy endpoint recovery. Complementing the new releases, Dell is offering new simplified pricing for vRanger, giving organisations with growing virtual environments access to a scalable VM backup solution.

Next Wave of Dell XC Series Appliances Expand Dell’s Software-Defined Storage Portfolio

Dell also announced the next wave of Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances, which integrate compute, storage and hypervisor resources into a single offering to help reduce TCO and streamline data centres. The new appliances help Dell support the growing customer interest in hyperconverged solutions where spending  is expected to grow by almost 60 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2014 to 2019, reaching a total of $3.9bn by 2019, according to analyst firm IDC.7

The latest hyperconverged solutions include the Dell XC6320, the highest-density XC Series appliance to-date, with four compute nodes that support more than 44 terabytes of storage in a 2U form factor. This substantially reduces data centre hardware rack space, power and cooling required to run various workloads in service provider, ROBO and large customer data centres. New Dell XC630-10F and XC6320-6F All-Flash Nodes are the first XC Series all-flash appliances, offering a cost-for-performance boost with data tiering between flash drives types based on actual data usage.

ProDeploy Enterprise Suite Gets More Out of Technology Starting Day One

The Dell ProDeploy Enterprise Suite includes three deployment services and full training and certification to help secure the path to a future-ready data centre. The flagship ProDeploy Plus, the industry’s most complete deployment service, rapidly integrates new technologies and optimises the long-term performance of critical systems. Expert deployment means customers are able to deploy up to 39 percent faster2, giving them time to fuel innovation.

Matt Eastwood, SVP, IDC Enterprise Infrastructure and Data Centre, said: “The proliferation of digital technologies is quickly driving IT organisations to transform their infrastructure and partner more closely with business counterparts to deliver greater insights and value necessary to help improve customer experiences.

“Dell has a good pulse on the needs of its customers and is investing in and developing the right set of 3rd Platform-based technologies and solutions. This will be critical to help meet the needs for increased utilisation rates and productivity requirements of the digital economy.”

Dell is in the process of acquiring EMC, but how well do you know EMC? Try our quiz!