Dell’s (News - Alert) innovative new enterprise Storage SC Series arrays with flash support are being made available this month, in a major breakthrough in the flash storage and technology arena. The storage series supports Mainstream Read-Intensive flash drives that are based on TLC 3D NAND technology, the first available solution supporting the high-density and low cost flash option.
The beefed up series is designed to help organizations reduce costs when it comes to storing and managing an increasingly large amount of data and applications. The Storage SC Series utilizes a virtualized array architecture and intelligent data placement technology, enabling customers to easily adopt new Mainstream Read-Intensive SSDs that are based on TLC 3D NAND technology. The result is lower cost per gigabyte pricing before data reduction technologies are even applied, a major benefit for enterprises and data centers.
“Dell’s announcement of flash drives built on TLC 3D NAND technology puts them in the storage density lead at 45TB per rack unit for flash-based arrays and drops the dollar per gigabyte cost of enterprise flash storage to roughly the same cost as 15K RPM HDDs -- with significantly higher performance,” said Eric Burgener, research director, storage systems, IDC (News - Alert). “Cost has been the single biggest stumbling block to flash adoption in the data center, and Dell’s announcement of a new lower dollar per gigabyte price point for all-flash configurations enables the use of flash technology across an even greater variety of enterprise workloads.”
Benefits of the new flash-enabled series include patented Dell Data Progression intelligent data placement technology along with a new release of Dell Storage Center 6.6 array software. Dell is also offering arrays that combine the new Mainstream RI flash drives with Write-Intensive flash drives, using intelligent array software to route writes to the lower cost flash drives while maintaining high performance levels.
The new drives are available in capacities up to 3.8 TB, and the series can provide a 90-TB array using only 2U of rack space. The SC8000 arrays can also support up to 62 percent more flash, offering a total of up to three petabytes of raw flash capacity in one array.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson