Tech Shout!

Dell and Microsoft have tied-up to offer a unified, networked storage system for file and application data that claims to deliver enterprise-class manageability, versatility, and performance for businesses of all sizes.

The Dell PowerVault NX1950 with Microsoft Windows Unified Data Storage Server 2003 is being marketed as offering the performance, advanced management features and flexibility of a mid-range unified storage device at an affordable price. It can also help customers reduce complexity and storage costs by eliminating separate licensing for additional features and protocols such as snapshots, replication and resource management.

The PowerVault NX1950 integrated solution includes single or two-node cluster configurations featuring a redundant SAS-based back-end storage array scaling up to 45 drives. Available now, the system is priced from about $17,000(U.S). Configurations with 4.5TB start at less than $24,000.

In addition, Dell has also unveiled PowerVault MD3000, a versatile, direct-attached storage range delivering high performance and high availability for significant applications. The PowerVault MD3000 is the first external RAID SAS array from a tier-one storage system company. The expandability, availability, enhanced snapshot and virtual disk copy functionality of the PowerVault MD3000 make it a perfect platform for clustered applications such as Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. Furthermore, these applications are including more advanced replication capability in the software itself. The MD3000 complements this by offering easy-to-use and highly-capable storage at a fraction of the price of storage area networks.

Further on, the PowerVault MD3000 uses dual active/active RAID controllers to improve performance and availability - producing up to 1, 400 MB/s of throughput and approximately 90,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). The throughput performance aids applications such as video services and file serving while the high IOP/s make it suited for applications with high transactional performance requirements – such as databases and email applications.

The PowerVault MD3000 is Dell’s second storage product to comply with the Storage Bridge Bay 1.0 specification. Dell is a founding member of the Storage Bridge Bay Working Group that is dedicated to developing industry standards that help accelerate the adoption of new storage technologies and deliver enhanced quality and affordability.

Pricing for the Dell PowerVault MD3000 starts at $6,499.

PowerVault MD3000 Features:

Capacity – Up to 4.5TB per system;

Expansion - Ability to expand with up to two MD1000 arrays for a total of 13.5 TB;

Two Node Clustering – This is the first PowerVault MD product to support two node clustering providing high availability and fault tolerance for applications or services.

Multi-host Capability – Attach up to four Dell PowerEdge servers.

Performance – Active/active RAID controllers can produce up to 1, 400 MB/s of throughput and approximately 90,000 IOPS from cache. This is nearly twice the throughput of the PowerVault MD1000.

Redundant Architecture – The direct-attached storage array uses two active/active RAID controllers with mirrored cache and I/O multi-pathing capabilities to help ensure processing continues without interruption. Also includes hot-pluggable, redundant power supplies, cooling modules and disk drives, active disk scrubbing and non-disruptive firmware upgrades

Manageable - Delivers a number of easy-to-use, intelligent storage management features for configuration and administration, partitioning, and dynamic disk expansion. Optional management features provide enhanced data availability via snapshots and virtual disk copies.