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If you're gearing up to pitch Dell's trade-in program to enterprise customers looking to expand their iSCSI storage, you might be interested to know about some significant advances Dell has made recently in its EqualLogic storage systems.
The company in February unveiled the EqualLogic PS6100, a series of 1 GB and 10 GB, 2U or 4U iSCSI arrays, some of which can mix solid-state with spinning hard drives and be configured in multiple storage tiers with automatic data migration.
That's right; Dell now offers the ability to configure multi-tiered storage in a single array. The EqualLogic PS6100XS can accept up to seven 400 GB SSDs plus another 17 600 GB 10K RPM 6 GB/s SAS drives for a total storage capacity of nearly 13 TB, including 2.8 TB of very fast SSD storage. And this all takes place with 2.5-inch drives in a single 2U array. The predecessor to this model housed a maximum of 16 3.5-inch drives in a 3U chassis.
[Related: Chart Topper: Latest Dell PowerEdge A Screamer]
But the magic really happens in the software. Dell's migration algorithm constantly monitors data movement and performance across all arrays and migrates the most active data where there's the least latency, taking into account disk media, RAID level and other factors, the company said. This array-based intelligence enables the system as a whole to take on greater workloads, and is well suited to spiky workloads typical of VDI and online transaction processing environments.
The 6100 series also now adds more resiliency and fault tolerance with vertical port sharing. "In the event of a cable failure or accidental disconnect, rather than losing the bandwidth because the cable is no longer there, the communications simply switches to the other port and cable," explained Jeff Junker, a technical marketing consultant at Dell.
The feature also can help with network clutter. "A cross point switch inside each controller allows each port to use the corresponding port on the redundant controller as a backup, so you can still get full bandwidth and fail-over with half the cables," Junker said. "This is particularly useful in port constrained environments like remote offices where network ports are maxed or at a premium."
NEXT: Dell EqualLogic PS6100 Performance Results
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