Dell World 2013: Dell Announces All-Flash Array And New Networking Switches

Dell has announced a range of new storage and networking products at its Dell World 2013 conference in Austin, claiming its new enterprise technology will help customers architect new data centres and modernise campus networks so they can meet the growing demands of end users.

The main storage announcement concerns the next generation of Dell EqualLogic storage, which the manufacturer says confirms its ability to offer flash at the price of disk and unlocks the true power of solid state storage. The network switches include wired and wireless enterprise offerings.

Six models of the Dell EqualLogic PS6210 series arrays have been revealed, including all-flash, hybrid and all-HDD varieties, and promise up to three times better performance and four times the memory of previous generations with a faster, more powerful storage controller.

The true power of flash

“One EqualLogic PS6210 all-flash array can provide higher performance and capacity compared with four all-15K disk arrays while delivering 64 percent lower latency, 75 percent less rack space and 11 percent lower total cost,” says Dell.

The company adds that the new arrays are especially cost effective for highly virtualised environments, claiming they can support 2.4 times the number of virtual desktops and double the OLTP database workload performance.

“The scale-out architecture enables organisations to minimise I/O bottlenecks and address growing workloads with flash-enabled SANs that can achieve more than 1.2 million IOPS with less than two millisecond latency.”

The new arrays are supported by Dell EqualLogic Software 7.0, which has been updated to simplify storage management with an improved user interface. The 64-bit software version that still works with the 32-bit version for older arrays, Dell says. Support for the new version has been added to Dell’s EqualLogic SAN Headquarters 3.0 reporting and analysis platform.

New switches

The Dell OpenManage sever management platform has also been updated so that customers can automate server deployments and configurations, making it simpler to manage environments comprising one server to thousands and reducing setup time.

Dell’s networking offerings have also received some attention, with the company saying its new products can help businesses cope with increasingly demanding end users, adding that many current networks are not ready for developments such as BYOD.

The new W series wireless network switches provide “unprecedented” Wi-Fi data rates of up to 1.3Gps using the 802.11ac standard, which Dell follows other Wi-Fi vendors in describing as a “wired experience on wireless”, while the N series is a range of energy efficient, cost effective 1GbE and 10GbE switches designed for modernising and scaling networks. The W series is available from today and the N series will be released in early 2014.

“Today’s announcements further redefine data centre economics with technology that provides unsurpassed product functionality and lower total cost of ownership to power modern workloads through storage and networking innovation,” says Marius Haas, chief commercial officer and president, Dell Enterprise Solutions. “Dell’s approach offers intelligent solutions that prepare customers with a future-ready data centre built on a scalable architecture to support their data centre growth.”

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