In amongst a raft of new developments Dell unveiled at its first European Dell Storage Forum, held recently in London, were extensions to the company’s Compellent Storage Area Networks (SANs) and an extended relationship with network systems provider, Brocade, highlighted the company’s developments in optimising storage for the cloud.
A new, Version 6.0 of the Compellent Storage Center software has been introduced, including 64-bit support that doubles memory size to improve performance and scale. This now offers comprehensive storage tiering, together with thin provisioning and replication features.
The Version 6.0 firmware enables datacentre managements to improve cost savings by exploiting Compellent’s modular design. This means they can just upgrade the firmware and implement future product releases without getting into rip-and-replace processes.
Storage Center 6.0 also expands Dell and VMware’s long-standing integration and engineering collaboration to help customers accelerate their move to dynamic datacentres and Cloud computing environments. To this end Dell has introduced new VMware-specific enhancements for Compellent storage customers.
These include new storage APIs for array integration between Compellent and VMware’s vSphere, which offer full copy offload and hardware-assisted locking features that are said to make deployment of virtual machines up to 40% faster. A new Compellent Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) for Site Recovery Manager 5is also now available for download with support for new SRM 5 features such as automated failback from a disaster and new work flows for planned migration and downtime.
Enhancements to Dells Fluid Data Architecture, which is designed to allow users to quickly adapt to the changing storage demands and increase automation of storage management processes, means that it can now be combined with Brocade's 16Gb Fibre Channel infrastructure.
This means that Compellent users can now create flexible, reliable and simple SAN environments to support next-generation applications and services within highly-virtualized, cloud-optimized environments. The Brocade DCX 8510 SAN backbone simplifies scale-out network design to reduce network complexity, management, and costs. It ability to consolidate legacy SANs also helps maximize overall port density and space utilization. The Brocade 6510 switch is aimed at users looking for `pay-as-you-grow’ scalability with 24 to 48 ports for on-demand flexibility.
The company has introduced a new Storage Platform, the DR4000, which features de-duplication and compression from Dell’s Ocarina Networks acquisition. These capabilities eliminate multiple copies of the same data and enable customers to keep more data online longer and readily available in the event of a disaster or data loss.
The DR4000 is ideal for small- and medium-sized organizations as well as remote offices of large enterprises in need of a disk-based backup solution.
Dell also launched a new solution for Microsoft SharePoint infrastructure optimization, which consists of Dell DX storage, Dell Microsoft SharePoint assessment, design, and deployment services and AvePoint DocAve software. The offering delivers solutions for SharePoint lifecycle management and migration.
