Dell unveils enterprise flash drives

Dell EqualLogic joins the enterprise flash drive community

Developments of the week in storage

Dell EqualLogic this week joined the enterprise flash drive community and showed it's spinning the wheels right by offering its customers a new family of storage arrays.

The PS6000 family includes the PS6000S, PS6000E, PS6000X, PS6000XV and PS6500E. Of these new models, which scale to as much as 576TB, the PS6000S contains solid state drives (SSD) and starts at $25,000. The PS6000S uses Samsung’s 50GB single level cell solid state drives.

The models are differentiated from each other by performance and capacity. The pricing for the other PS6000 series arrays starts at $17,000.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Dell EqualLogic this week joined the enterprise flash drive community and showed it's spinning the wheels right by offering its customers a new family of storage arrays.

The PS6000 family includes the PS6000S, PS6000E, PS6000X, PS6000XV and PS6500E. Of these new models, which scale to as much as 576TB, the PS6000S contains solid state drives (SSD) and starts at $25,000. The PS6000S uses Samsung’s 50GB single level cell solid state drives.

The models are differentiated from each other by performance and capacity. The pricing for the other PS6000 series arrays starts at $17,000.

In addition, the PS6000 family includes a redesigned storage controller that adds a fourth Gigabit Ethernet port per controller; support for RAID6; and Serial ATA, Serial Attached SCSI and SSD drive options.

The company has enhanced its software with support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization technology. Dell EqualLogic also announced integration with VMware’s vStorage initiative, whose APIs allow snapshots, provisioning, replication and restore, directly with individual virtual machines in conjunction with the clustering and pooling capabilities of the VMware Infrastructure.

Further, the company unveiled a new management dashboard called SAN Headquarters, which monitors as much as 10 petabytes of EqualLogic storage. In addition, the company announced a series of support and consulting options that will help customers deploy EqualLogic storage.

Finally, Dell announced the availability of the NX4 Network Attached Storage array, which it co-developed in its alliance with EMC. The NX4 supports Linux, Windows and Unix environments and has iSCSI and Fibre Channel connectivity.

P.S. Storage Strategies NOW is taking advantage of the interest in enterprise flash drives by offering a subscription-based Outlook Report on Solid State Disk Adoption in Enterprise IT Environments. For more details contact me.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.