Dell, which paid $940 million for Compellent last year, is so enthralled with its new IP that it is rebranding its entire storage strategy after Compellent's Liquid Storage identifier.
It's
noteworthy that both Hewlett-Packard and Dell, which each bought young,
progressive storage companies last year, have taken their prized new IP and
made it the centerpieces of their storage strategies only months after closing
the deals.
We're
not sure exactly what that says about the older storage products those
well-established systems makers have been selling for years, but it does
indicate the term "freshening up" was probably used by the buyers at
some point in deciding to do both transactions.
HP
announced this week that it is cross-pollinating software and services from the
$2.35
billion 3PAR acquisition into its older array systems. On the other hand,
Dell-
which
paid a mere $940 million for Compellent-is so enthralled with what it got
that it is rebranding its entire storage strategy after Compellent's Liquid
Storage identifier.
At
its first all-storage customer and partner conference in Orlando, Fla., this
week (Dell Storage Forum, which continues through June 11) that combined the
former Compellent and EqualLogic events, Dell introduced some new systems and a
refresh of its old standby, PowerVault.
New-product
and other highlights of the Fluid Data Architecture lineup:
- Demonstration of 16G-bps Fibre Channel infrastructure
interoperability at the show. Dell demonstrated compatibility of a Dell
Compellent Storage Center SAN with a Brocade 6510 16Gb Fibre Channel switch and
a Brocade 1860 16Gb Fabric Adapter. Dell said it will have 16G-bps Fibre
Channel offerings available this fall.
- Dell PowerVault MD3600f/MD3620f adds Fibre
Channel to its menu choices. Key features: eight 8G-bps Fibre Channel ports
(four per controller); additional capacity can be added up to a maximum of 96
hard drives via the PowerVault MD1200 and/or MD1220 enclosures; users can mix
3.5-inch and 2.5-inch enclosures behind their base units for drive tiering; and
data protection options that include snapshots, virtual disk copy and remote
replication services.
- Dell unveiled its first unified Dell
EqualLogic platform. The EqualLogic FS7500 adds scalable network-attached
storage (NAS) capability to the EqualLogic product line-making it a
high-performance, scale-out unified storage for midsize deployments. The FS7500
uses the Dell Scalable File System, which incorporates features formerly found
only at the high end-including snapshots, advanced caching, load balancing and
multithreading for fast I/O processing. Other features: N-way scalability with
automated failover and a single namespace; scale-out CIFS and NFS support; and scale
a single share up to 510TB.
- Dell EqualLogic software upgraded to v5.1. Key
features: DCB Support is designed to improve quality of service with consistent
and even traffic flow in a converged SAN/LAN networking fabric; enhanced load
balancing capability provides the ability to automatically balance storage
traffic between EqualLogic arrays; and enhanced thin provisioning awareness
with VMware vSphere 4.1 reduces recovery time and helps mitigate the risk of
potential data loss.
The
new products will become available later this summer.
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Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz
