Addressing what it calls the sub-hyperscale market, Dell has launched a range of hardware and tools aimed at providing the “the right balance of performance, flexibility, openness, and server economics” for this fast growing segment.
The company said that the releases are the result of a comprehensive feedback process with users in various sectors, such as web tech, telco, hosting companies, oil and gas, and research organisations, and come under the heading of Datacentre Scalable Solutions (DSS).
DSS range
Leading the charge is the DSS 7000, which Dell claims is the “industry’s densest storage server,” designed to meet the storage needs of an exa-scale deployment. The DSS 7000 delivers up to 720 terabytes of storage in a single 4U chassis, with up to 90 3.5” drives and two 2-socket server nodes to provide cloud builders with a low dollar-per-gigabyte cost for object and block storage.
The DSS 1500, 1510 and 2500 are new 1U and 2U servers, which Dell says feature minimalistic design, flexible storage and IO options, industry-standard BMC systems management and the latest Intel Xeon processors to maximise operational efficiency with powerful performance.
Dell says that the DSS-branded products have been purpose-built to provide the segment with the necessary technology to meet workload needs, now and in the future. The company said DSS will continue to leverage its agile operating model to engage with customers on feature modifications and supply chain requirements in order to drive business innovation.
Other storage offerings in the release are the Storage SC9000 all-flash and hybrid models, in a more scalable system using the 13G server platform. It delivers 40% more IOPs (over 385,000 IOPs) and offers 4x system memory and 2x expansion bandwidth (12G SAS backend with new expansion) compared to previous capabilities. New Dell Storage expansion enclosures include a new 12G SAS backend, to double the throughput speed, and enable customers to mix different SSD and HDD types in two, 2U models, the Storage SC400 (12 x 3.5” bays) and SC420 (24 x 2.5” drive bays).
Storage Center
New Storage Center 6.7 array software new capabilities include Live Volume auto-failover for built-in disaster recovery with zero workload downtime; new active data compression capabilities offering up to 93% flash capacity savings; and, enabling SC9000 all-flash arrays as low as $.65/GB usable capacity.
The XC Series has been expanded with the next wave of XC Series of web-scale converged appliances powered by Nutanix. The XC6320, is Dell’s highest-density XC Series appliance to-date, and incudes 4 compute nodes supporting 44+ TBs of storage in 2U. This substantially reduces rack space, power and cooling required to run various workloads in large customer data centres.
The XC630-10F and XC6320-6F All-Flash Nodes are the first XC Series all-flash appliances. Initially, they will be available offered with a single-tier of flash, but with the upcoming Nutanix NOS update (NOS 4.5.1, expected Q4FY16), they will provide data tiering between flash drives types based on actual data usage for more optimised costs.
DP and DR
Data protection and recovery have been addressed with Dell Data Protection |Rapid Recovery, which is a next-generation data protection software solution that integrates features of Dell AppAssure and other Dell IP to help eliminate downtime for customer environments.
The solution includes a number of key features, says Dell, such as Rapid Recovery features “Rapid Snap for Applications” technology that can capture an entire application and its relevant state, enabling complete application and system recovery with near-zero RTOs and aggressive RPOs. A new Rapid Snap for Virtual capability, based on Dell vRanger technology, provides scalable protection of growing VMware environments without agents, and automatically detects and backs up VMs provisioned on an ESXi host. The simple bare metal restore (BMR) feature from cloud-based archives, says Dell, reinforces its ongoing focus on powerful cloud connectivity and recovery. The solution also features a Rapid Recovery Repository (R3) with encryption and client-side deduplication based on proven Rapid Data Access (RDA) technology. R3 delivers direct-to-target backups and significantly reduces the deduplication workload, resulting in quicker snapshots, reduced data transfer times, and greater scale.
Wrapping around all of this is the ProDeploy Enterprise Suite that aims to provide a full selection of services to support deployments.
Large scale customers
“The data centre announcements really cover the hardware, software and services designed to help large scale data centre customers. For them, it is about achieving mission critical business goals faster and more consistently, with a focus on lower cost and less downtime,” said Niamh Townsend, general manager, Dell Ireland.
Townsend said that although there are not that many hyper-scale deployments here, there is still a market here.
“From the Ireland perspective, we don’t have a huge number of large scale data centres in the indigenous business, but we are seeing uses for that web-scale, converged appliances, and the model of building out node by node. “
“We are expanding our portfolio around cloud solutions, looking along the customers’ journey to support and accelerate.”
“One of the trends we are seeing is repatriation,” noted Townsend, “having gone to the cloud, pulling back some of the core business workloads and data, not away from the cloud, but more into private cloud and managed cloud services. This is the hybrid cloud model enabling what we call the Future Ready Enterprise.”
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