Dell has begun shipping its next-generation iSCSI SAN arrays, targeted at businesses that are swamped with data but stuck with drying-up budgets.
Within days of finalizing its $1.4 billion purchase of
EqualLogic, Dell has delivered the first fruits of its promise to bring
plug-and-play ease to data storage.
Dell launched its EqualLogic PS series of iSCSI SAN
(storage area network) products in a splashy Nashua,
N.H., event that was simultaneously Webcast
on Feb. 4.
"The world will generate nearly a zettabyte of data by 2010,
and our customers will be responsible for managing the bulk of it," CEO
Michael Dell said during the launch. "We are committed to simplifying IT
and EqualLogic will help us realize that vision for our customers worldwide,"
he said in a press release.
Dell, with its recently acquired EqualLogic brand, can help customers do
that easily and affordably, said its CEO. "[EqualLogic
SAN technology] installs in minutes, not
days. They manage themselves. And they grow easily and plug into virtualized IT
[infrastructure]," Dell said. "We're delivering complete, virtualized
data center solutions to our customers."
Dell
snapped up EqualLogic for $1.4 billion in November. EqualLogic's systems,
which target midmarket companies that operate with constrained budgets, rely on
proprietary software designed to simplify storage and management of data.
In other words, the systems are for companies that require, but can't afford,
SANs.
It's not hard to understand Dell's zest for the storage market: Companies
with big storage needs and small budgets are legion, particularly in the
midmarket. IDC is looking at 140 percent
market growth for iSCSI SANs every year for the next five years and expects the
total market to grow from about $600 million in 2006 to $6 billion in that same
time frame.
Dell on Feb. 4 launched the Dell EqualLogic PS5000E, a virtualized iSCSI SAN.
The SAN contains SATA (Serial ATA) disk
drives that Dell says will deliver "excellent" cost per gigabyte and
up to 16TB of high-capacity storage.
The PS5000E is an intelligent storage array that Dell says installs
rapidly—in less than 1 hour, Dell claims—offers easy management and is designed
to expand seamlessly. All the PS series arrays include SAN
configuration and capabilities that sense network topology, automatically build
RAID sets and conduct system health checks, including individual drive health
and capacity utilization of the array.
When asked what the sweet spot is for EqualLogic storage deployment
capacity, Dell's Travis Vigil, a senior product marketing consultant, responded
in a Web chat that the value of the EqualLogic products "really shines
after adding more than one array to the SAN."
Most customers have deployed more than one array, Vigil said, with capacity
varying widely depending on I/O requirements. "Fifteen thousand SAS offers
the best I/O performance, and SATA offers the best $/GB," he wrote.
Darren Thomas, Dell vice president and general manager, said macro trends
show "relentless" growth of data regardless of company size. "Every
company feels that, from the smallest to the largest," Thomas said. "And
continued tightness of IT budgets: That trend continues. That overlays the
entire industry, and it's what drives customers to buy and behave the way they
do."
iSCSI—a popular SAN protocol that allows
clients (aka "initiators") to send SCSI commands to SCSI storage
devices on remote servers—is "interesting," Thomas said, given that
it offers a ubiquitous Gigabit Ethernet interface that brings capabilities that
just haven't been there in the past.
Some of the attributes of the PS5000 Series include iSCSI Interconnectivity,
wherein the IP protocol enables fully virtualized storage arrays and storage
networks designed to work seamlessly in an IP data center. The PS5000 also
features built-in virtualization architecture designed to provide extensive
flexibility, intelligent automation of routine processes, and on-the-fly
performance optimization that responds to application demands.
The PS5000 also features modular scalability. That means that each modular
storage array is a complete SAN. As arrays
are added to a group, storage performance grows linearly, network bandwidth
expands and the group continues to behave as one virtual SAN.
The series' storage management features remote replication and thin
provisioning. Also, each array can be configured to attain a desired ratio of
capacity to performance—for example, users can create multiple tiers of SAS-
and SATA-based storage in one SAN and can
optimize each tier for the given applications it serves.
In addition to the product news, Dell is playing up EqualLogic in relation
to its nascent channel program—an area in which Dell has a poor reputation.
EqualLogic, on the other hand, has primarily been sold through the channel. The
question now is whether EqualLogic will bolster Dell's channel presence, or if
Dell will cripple or break the foundation that EqualLogic has created in the
channel.
"Dell is committed to growing the already successful channel business
of EqualLogic," Vigil said in the Web chat. "Along with the rollout
of our Partner Direct Channel programs, Dell is committed to the success of the
not only the EqualLogic products, but also other Dell Enterprise products
through the indirect channel."
Dell is referring questions on pricing to its Dell channel partners or to
businesses' reps, although executives did say pricing starts at $19,000 for the
PS5000E iSCSI.
Detailed product information is available here
on Dell's site.
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