Dell Compellent optimizes bays with multi-SSD

After a first day on the servers at its Enterprise Forum event in San Jose, Dell has a focus on storage by announcing a 100% option for SSD bays Compellent by combining two types of flash, MLC and SLC component. The company is also pursuing the integration of deduplication and compression in storage solutions.

Live from San Jose - In Dell's strategy on the data center, storage is an important point. Just as the world server, it is time for optimization. As a preamble at the event called Dell Enterprise Forum in San Jose, Peter Evans, VP Enterprise Solution at the Texan drew a parallel with the U.S. highways. "For data, it takes several ways, slow, fast and ultra-fast last and keep the possibility of guided by" [needs]. With this image, it introduced the first announcements in the field of storage. First, the OS Compellent Storage Center is now in version 6.4, a free update for existing customers. This trend focuses on the automatic prioritization of data on SSD and data management block or file mode. Peter Korce explained that the OS is the first "to prioritize the sub-LUN data on both conventional disks and SSDs to accelerate write some [SLC] and played on other [MLC]."

A 100% SSD option

Unlike some manufacturers, Dell has not announced a bay dedicated 100% flash, but an option named Compellent flash optimized on existing solutions with specific controllers. This option will be available on or SC40 SC8000 bays which include 24 sites of which 12 are pre-loaded with 6 SSD / 400GB SLC SSD and 6 / MLC 1.2 TB Customers can also opt for a hybrid solution panachant SSD and traditional hard. Bob Fine, Compellent product manager states that "the SLC is more suitable for data requiring intensive writing, while MLC is better read." This guidance is for flash-intensive applications such as storage resource databases, platforms, virtualization or transactional operations.


If this choice meets the technical criteria, the question of cost is also an answer. Dell announced a 75% reduction in costs compared to competing solutions, but Bob Fine did not however want to give an indication of prices, as this option will not happen until the third quarter of 2013. Performance part, Dell announced a rate of 300,000 IOPS, the same level as the flash Bay EF540 NetApp. To improve the density, Dell also introduced a high-density equipment 5U, the SC280 has 84 disks, or 336 TB with 4 TB disks

Integrating deduplication continues

Another development, Storage Center 6.4 includes version 3 of the file system named Dell Fluid File System. Among the innovations, first of all we note the doubling of storage space (namespace) that go from January to February Po then Dell announces integration of deduplication and compression based on technology acquired in 2010 with Ocarina . With this feature, the company intends to release half of storage capacity by optimizing the use of blocks. Moreover, Fluid FS v3 supports NFS and SMB v4.0 v2.1 v3.0 SMB but not yet useful in a Windows Server 2012 environment. These developments will be available first on the Bay Compellent FS8600, but should arrive on Equallogic arrays before the end of the year.