Dell Targets Flash With Storage Center Operating System 7

Dell continues to round out its enterprise offerings with the official release of Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7).

The new operating system targets the next generation of all-flash and hybrid flash arrays and promises to deliver advanced deduplication and deeper intelligence, coupled with greater flexibility, virtualisation and control.

Storage Center

Dell says that SCOS 7 “aggressively promotes the adoption of flash, by bringing lower acquisition costs across flash and hybrid arrays and provides investment protection for Dell PS Series customers as they explore future-ready technologies”.

The firm said the arrival of SCOS 7 marks the culmination of a three-year effort to redefine the economics of enterprise storage in light of the industry shift to flash-based architectures.

Dell claims that SCOS 7 will help lower acquisition costs across flash and hybrid arrays; help lower lifecycle costs elevated simplified management; and enhance support for virtualisation and cloud strategies.

“Dell’s SC Series has always been an extremely progressive storage platform – and SCOS 7 is by far our most revolutionary software release to date,” said Alan Atkinson, VP and general manager, Dell Storage. “We designed the SC platform from the ground up to be future ready and this release takes flash, deduplication and system intelligence to the next level.”

Dell also said that SCOS 7 helps customers store more data on fewer drives, thanks to new, patented Intelligent Deduplication and enhanced Intelligent Block-Level Compression. This allows its to claim up to 10:1 capacity savings, which in turn helps reduce the cost of both flash and disk tiers.

“Deduplication and compression are applied automatically and dynamically to optimise performance and cost savings throughout the data lifecycle,” said the company.

A Live Migration option means that multi-array federation becomes a standard capability for SC9000, SC8000 and SC4020 arrays. This allows sStorage administrators to move volumes quickly and seamlessly between arrays, optimising and re-balancing the environment without interrupting workloads and without purchasing additional virtualisation hardware or software.

VMware VVOLs support also allows provisioning, monitoring and management of storage at a virtual machine level.

Availability of SCOS 7 depends on the model in use. For example Dell SC Series customers will see SCOS 7 delivered via a free firmware upgrade, providing they have a current support contract.

SC9000 customers meanwhile will gain most SCOS 7 features immediately.

General availability across the SC Series portfolio is planned for the third quarter of this year.

Busy Time

Dell developers have been hard at work recently. In January this year Dell released its Operating System 10 (OS10) for its next generation networking platforms.

Dell of course is in the middle of a hugely expensive purchase of storage giant EMC, that will see the PC maker take on about $59.1bn (£41bn) in debt as a result of the acquisition.

Last month EMC revealed its first quarter results that made for uncomfortable reading for new owner Michael Dell. Whilst it managed a modest profit increase, sales were down to $5.5bn (£3.8bn) from $5.6bn (£3.9bn) a year earlier.

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