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Dell Technologies—which became an official corporate entity on Sept. 7, 11 months after Dell announced plans to acquire EMC—has wasted no time coming out with its first software-defined storage product from the combined company.
This one is the ScaleIO Ready Node, an all-flash, software-defined offering released Sept. 15 that runs on Dell EMC PowerEdge x86 servers.
ScaleIO Ready Node’s main value-add is that it enables users to quickly deploy a server storage-area network that fits within existing legacy infrastructure. The unit combines flexible configurations of PowerEdge servers with ScaleIO software as a Dell EMC-validated, fully supported SDS solution.
Key features of ScaleIO Ready Node include the following:
—Next-gen hardware: ScaleIO Ready Node runs on workload-optimized Dell PowerEdge rack servers, designed to deliver high performance, flexibility and scalability.
—Enhanced caching layer: Caching software makes the most actively used data accessible in faster-responding media for applications utilizing hybrid-based configurations.
—Operating system flexibility: ScaleIO Ready Node delivers a server SAN with the flexibility needed to adapt as business needs and standards change. Works with Linux, Windows, Unix and OpenStack.
ScaleIO Ready Node is also hypervisor-agnostic. It supports VMware vSphere, Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V, Linux and OpenStack deployments.
Users also have the ability to select from different deployment models (storage-only and hyper-converged) and configurations, including all-flash and hybrid. Users are not confined by having to grow both compute and storage simultaneously but can add these independently.
“Historically, having server-based flash led to poor resource utilization because performance and capacity were only supporting local applications,” Josh Goldstein, vice president of product management and marketing at Dell EMC, said in a blog post.
“With the software-defined storage in ScaleIO Ready Nodes, the ability to abstract, pool and automate storage devices across a multitude of servers, and in turn, allocate as little or as much performance and capacity as needed to individual applications, is just as easy as allocating compute and memory resources in a virtualized environment.”
Go here to view a short video on ScaleIO Ready Node.
You can try the ScaleIO software for free here.