announcement

Dell Updates Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7)

In case you missed it, Dell recently announced Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7) with several enhancements for their SC series storage systems (e.g. Compellent). For those who are under maintenance agreements, the new features are no charge upgrades. Most of the SCOS 7 features should be generally available now (or soon) for the SC9000 series with other platform support phased in over time.

Summary of Dell SC07 enhancements features

Block level dedupe in addition to previous file dedupe
Enhanced compression as a companion to dedupe of HDD and SSD data
Single volumes or LUN can span across HDD and SSD tiers
Live migration and volume management with load balancing
Ability to move volumes between arrays
Quality of Service (QoS) for performance across volumes and volume groups
QoS set by IOPs, bandwidth and latency of standard volumes and VMware VVOL
New Storage Manager replaces SC Enterprise Manager for unified management
Delivers on promise of a unified SC and FS NAS management
Ability to replicate data between PS (EqualLogic) and SC (Compellent)
HTML 5 interface and non-disruptive implementation

Where To Learn More

Learn more about Dell SC Series enhancements here and here.

What This All Means

Dell is following through on its previous commitments to both PS (e.g. EqualLogic) and SC (e.g. Compellent) customers with enhancements to increase functionality along with simplify management. These features will become more important to add continued to value to the SC and PS platforms independently of the impending Dell acquisition of EMC (e.g. Dell EMC). The elephant in the room discussion is with the impending Dell acquisition of EMC, and the new Dell EMC division (e.g. essentially the existing EMC plus the Dell Server group) what happens with the midrange storage products from both parties.

Dell has the SC and PS as well as lower end direct attached storage (DAS) based Powervault series as well as the Exanet based Fluid file System among other technologies including Ocarina based data footprint reduction (DFR). If you recall, the Ocarina technology acquired by Dell enables not only dedupe, also compression and other DFR (here and here) capabilities. Meanwhile EMC has the VNX and Unity (announced in May 2016) among other offerings.

Both Dell and EMC will need to continue to articulate the value of their midrange solutions prior to the acquisition closing. Likewise once the deal closes, the joint entities need to be crystal clear on where the different technologies fit for various markets or customer segments, as well as their future.

Overall a good set of enhancements for the Dell SC (and PS) series.

Ok, nuff said, for now…

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
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