Dell Announces a Load of New Storage Products
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New backup array for SMBs, upgraded storage network software and improved integrations with other products top the company's list of announcements at London event.
Dell, which acquired Compellent in late 2009 and within a few months realigned its corporate storage strategy around that company's "Fluid Data" IP,
on Jan. 11 announced a spate of new products. They include an update of its Compellent Storage Center software that
speeds up its tiering automation and data reduction functions, among
other things.
The Austin, Texas-based IT giant's storage development folks have
been working overtime. The company also announced a new optimization
package for Microsoft SharePoint deployments and improvements in its
EqualLogic and PowerVault integrations with VMware's vSphere 5
hypervisor and tools.
Dell
launched a new storage backup array, the DR4000. Finally, it also
revealed that all its storage products now work natively with Dell's own
Force10 Ethernet switch routes and PowerConnect networking switches, as
well as Brocade's next-generation 16Gbit Fibre Channel storage area
network (SAN) packages.
Dell made the announcements at its first European Dell Storage Forum event, staged in London.
Internal Integration Takes Time
It's taken a little while for Dell to integrate a rather large amount
of new IP from several companies it has acquired in the last few years,
but everything appears to be moving right along. All this interaction should be
good news to a number of Dell storage shops.
The whole Fluid Data concept is about the architecture being able to
adapt quickly to changing workload demands through automation. This
includes management of all enterprise's storage: primary, backup and
archive.
Storage Center 6.0 includes Dell's first deduplication backup appliance to integrate intellectual property from its 2010 Ocarina acquisition.
It includes 64-bit support that doubles memory size; all that extra
memory enables much faster processing, leading to significant
performance improvements in tiering, thin provisioning and replication
features, Mike Davis of Dell's Dedupe Marketing Team told eWEEK.
Dell's new Solution for Microsoft SharePoint Infrastructure
Optimization consists of Dell DX storage, Dell Microsoft SharePoint
assessment, design, and deployment services and AvePoint DocAve
software. The package is designed to better enable SharePoint lifecycle
management and to result in improved capacity utilization and
performance, Bob Fine, Dell director of product marketing for
SharePoint, told eWEEK.
In upgrading its EqualLogic and PowerVault application integration
for VMware vSphere 5, Dell introduced new Compellent storage APIs for
array integration. These feature full copy offload and hardware-assisted
locking features that extend Compellent's existing support for block
zeroing, Davis said. These features speed deployment of virtual machines
up to 40 percent, Davis said.
New Array Aimed at SMBs
Dell's new hard disk-based DR4000 backup array, aimed at small and
midsize enterprises and remote offices of larger companies, includes all
of the Ocarina deduplication and compression capabilities. It is
available in 40TB, 81TB or 135TB storage capacities as a single
appliance.
Dell has added the Dell Force10 S4810 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch and the
deep-buffer S60 1G bit/10G bit Ethernet switches to the validated
component list. EqualLogic users can reduce deployment time with the
auto-recognition and auto-configuration features contained in most of
the Dell PowerConnect switches, Davis said.
All the new products will be available this quarter, Dell said.
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
