Dell today announced new Dell EqualLogic storage solutions and supporting software to help customers address the data management requirements of increasingly dynamic, virtualized data centers. The company also released details of new integration across its storage portfolio with the forthcoming VMware vSphere 5 virtualization and cloud infrastructure platform.

Today’s announcements represent another milestone in the continued evolution of Dell Fluid Data solutions, designed to help customers more effectively manage valuable business information in virtualized data centers.

"Organizations of all sizes continue to place a priority on boosting IT asset efficiency while improving IT responsiveness to business pressures. Ever greater exploitation of virtualization is a key element in these efforts, and the deployment of flexible and intelligent storage systems is frequently the key to successful efforts," said Richard Villars, vice president of storage and IT Strategies at IDC. "Dell's continued investment in advanced yet cost effective storage solutions along with a continued expansion of its enterprise service and solutions organization, puts the company in a strong position to help IT organizations get the most from their data centers, today, and in the future."

New Dell EqualLogic Storage Platform Extends Fluid Data Architecture

In support of customers’ growing storage demands, Dell introduced the EqualLogic PS6100 and PS4100 family of virtualized, IP-based storage offerings. Together with new Dell EqualLogic firmware version 5.1, Dell offers customers its next generation of EqualLogic storage solutions that seamlessly integrate into existing environments without downtime or a major overhaul. This helps customers to focus on managing their storage and not the manual process of upgrading infrastructure.

This launch marks the introduction of 2.5-inch drive support for the EqualLogic product line, providing greater density that enables users to store more in less space. Additionally, customers can gain up to 60 percent performance improvement on typical workloads with the EqualLogic PS Series compared to the previous generation EqualLogic arrays.¹

EqualLogic PS Series arrays, regardless of generation, work together to automatically manage data, load balance across all resources, and expand to meet growing storage needs. Dell provides these capabilities without requiring customers to “rip and replace” their storage environment during each upgrade cycle as they would with other vendors. New storage arrays include:

• EqualLogic PS4100 Series — ideal for small-to-medium businesses or remote office locations with growing storage needs. The SANs, supporting up to 36TB in a single array and 72TB in a single group, can scale as storage demands increase by seamlessly adding additional PS4100 or PS6100 arrays into an EqualLogic group.
• EqualLogic PS6100 Series — designed to provide mid-sized customers with a scalable storage environment, up to 72TB in a single array and 1.2PB in a single group, that can easily accommodate both high-performance and high-capacity drive options. The PS6100 family is ideal for customers looking for a storage solution to support the storage demands of a highly virtualized data center environment where the seamless movement and protection of virtual machines, applications and data is crucial.

With the newly redesigned, compact form factor, PS6100 customers can achieve the same performance for their typical workload using half the number of arrays, and receive 50 percent more expansion capacity when compared with the previous generation EqualLogic arrays.²

Dell also has begun shipping the new EqualLogic FS7500, the company’s latest NAS solution that works with EqualLogic PS Series arrays to deliver the only scale-out, unified storage platform for mid-size deployments. The FS7500 uses the Dell Scalable File System, which offers several advanced features including cache monitoring, load balancing and multi-threading for fast I/O processing.

Dell and VMware Partner for Industry-Leading Integrated Solutions

Dell and VMware have expanded their strategic partnership over the past decade, collaborating on engineering integration and solutions development since server virtualization first emerged. As customers’ virtual environments have grown, Dell and VMware have worked together to develop specifications for storage infrastructures, such as the VMware vSphere® Storage APIs for Array Integration, and have delivered highly virtualized data center and storage solutions to meet joint customer needs.

For example, the latest EqualLogic firmware version 5.1 includes thin provisioning awareness for VMware vSphere to help users save valuable recovery time and help mitigate the risk of potential data loss. Dell is one of VMware’s largest global resellers, helping enable the company to uniquely address customers’ virtualized storage needs.

In support of the forthcoming VMware vSphere 5, Dell today introduced a new set of VMware specific enhancements for Dell EqualLogic, Dell Compellent and Dell PowerVault storage customers. These will roll-out through Q3 and Q4 and include:

• Dell EqualLogic Host Integration Tools for VMware 3.1 — provide customers with enhanced storage visibility and datastore management as well as improved performance and availability through tight integration with VMware vSphere 5, VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Storage Awareness, VMware Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (SDRS), and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager™ 5.
• Dell Compellent Storage Replication Adapter for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 — supports automated failback from a disaster event and new workflows for planned migrations and downtime. Dell also is updating its Compellent plug-in support for VMware vSphere 5 to help customers more easily link their Compellent storage environment with virtualized resources.
• Dell PowerVault Integration with VMware vSphere 5 — adds certification and enables customers to manage multiple PowerVault MD3200/MD3600 series of storage arrays from a single VMware vCenter Server instance using the vCenter Plugin for Dell PowerVault MD. The Dell PowerVault MD storage arrays (iSCSI and Fibre Channel) also support VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Storage Awareness. The PowerVault MD3600f/MD3620f series of storage arrays support VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.1 and 5 using the Dell PowerVault Storage Replication Adapter (SRA).

New Software Enhancements Deliver Enterprise Storage Sophistication with SMB Simplicity

Dell today introduced additional capabilities to help customers gain insight into their storage environment and also better integrate with Microsoft virtualization offerings. Offering integrated, all-inclusive software, the EqualLogic platform retains its ease of management as the system scales. New solutions that bring enterprise-class functionality to smaller implementations include:

• Dell EqualLogic SAN Headquarters 2.2 software — includes new multi-site support so customers can easily monitor the health and activity of their storage environment across different geographies. The solution provides ongoing, real-time diagnostic information to enable customers to optimize and tune their system for performance and efficiency.
• Dell EqualLogic Host Integration Tools for Microsoft 4.0 — re-designed to enhance the usability experience with new features including centralized data protection and more efficient management of multiple Microsoft hosts and virtual machines. Enhanced Clustered Shared Volume (CSV) support has been designed to streamline data protection for CSVs and improve capacity utilization.

Quotes:

“The new EqualLogic capabilities mark a significant next step in the evolution of the Dell Fluid Data architecture and extend Dell’s leadership in virtualized IP-based storage solutions that are easy to manage,” said Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager, Dell Enterprise Storage. “The new storage arrays and virtualization tools can help our customers run highly optimized and efficient data centers by automating configuration and improving performance without forcing forklift upgrades.”

“VMware and Dell have proven time and time again that the integration of storage infrastructures and virtual environments can have a dramatic impact on a customer’s ability to increase flexibility while streamlining IT management,” said Narayan Venkat, vice president, product management, storage, VMware. “Our joint engineering efforts to integrate Dell storage solutions with the VMware platform continue to help customers grow their environments, meet business needs, and more efficiently manage business requirements without adding complexity or cost.”

“Any small or medium-sized company can do big things with the right technology,” said Jonathan Franconi, network administrator and technology coordinator, Guard Insurance Group. “We’ve virtualized about 113 apps, which represents 95 percent of our infrastructure, with Dell and VMware technology. Our business operations depend on the reliability of our IT network, and with a virtual infrastructure we can better protect our data and keep it highly available with Dell EqualLogic storage and Dell PowerEdge servers.”

“With the latest release of the Dell EqualLogic PS Series platform, Dell is expanding on the mid-market storage standard it has set in terms of ease of use, reliability and performance,” said Steve Bishop, Chief Technology Officer, Atlanta-based VeriStor Systems, a Dell PartnerDirect reseller. “This new series of storage arrays continues to integrate seamlessly with VMware and builds on the innovative Dell EqualLogic platform we trust for our mid-market virtual infrastructure implementations as well as our growing cloud-based disaster recovery services.”

Availability:

• Dell EqualLogic PS4100 and PS6100 Series and EqualLogic FS7500 are available starting today.
• Dell EqualLogic Host Integration Tools for VMware 3.1, Dell EqualLogic Host Integration Tools for Microsoft 4.0, and SAN Headquarters 2.2 software are in beta now and planned for release this year. These applications and tools are available at no additional charge for EqualLogic customers with valid support contracts.
• PowerVault software enhancements are planned for a September 2011 release at no additional charge for existing customers.