At the second day of Dell Storage Forum in Boston, they announced:
- New FluidFS (Exanet) FS8600 front end NAS gateway for Dell Compellent storage. The new gateway can be scaled from 1 to 4 dual controller configurations and can support a single file system/name space of up to 1PB in size. The FS8600 is available with 1GbE or 10GbE options and support 8Gbps FC attachments to backend storage.
- New Dell Compellent SC8000 controllers based on Dell’s 2U, 12th generation server hardware that can now be cooled with ambient air (115F?) and consumes lower power than previous Series 40 whitebox server controllers. Also the new hardware comes with dual 6-core processors and support 16 to 64GB of DRAM per controller or up to 128GB with dual controllers. The new controllers GA this month, support PCIe slots for backend 6Gbps SAS and frontend connectivity of 1GbE or 10GbE iSCSI, 10GbE FCoE or 8Gbps FC, with 16Gbps FC coming out in 2H2012.
- New Dell Compellent SC200 and SC220 drive enclosures a 2U 24 SFF drive enclosure or a 2U 12LFF drive enclosure configuration supporting 6Gbps SAS connectivity.
- New Dell Compellent SC6.0 operating software supporting a 64 bit O/S for larger memory, dual/multi-core processing.
- New FluidFS FS7600 (1GbE)/FS7610 (10GbE) 12th generation server front end NAS gateways for Dell EqualLogic storage which supports asynchronous replication at the virtual file system level. The new gateways also support 10GbE iSCSI and can be scaled up to 507TB in a single name space.
- New FluidFS NX3600 (1GbE) /NX3610 (10GbE) 12th generation server front end NAS gateways for PowerVault storage systems which can support up to 576TB of raw capacity for a single gateway or scale to two gateways for up to 1PB of raw storage in a single namespace/file system.
- Appasure 5 which includes better performance based on a new backend object store to protect even larger datasets. At the moment Appasure is a Windows only solution but with block deduplication/compression and change block tracking is already WAN optimized. Dell announced Linux support will be available later this year.
Probably more interesting was talk and demoing a prototype of their RNA Networks acquisition which supports a cache coherent PCIe SSD cards in Dell servers. The new capability is still on the drawing boards but is intended to connect to Dell Compellent storage and move tier 1 out to the server. Lot’s more to come on this. They call this Project Hermes for the Greek messenger god. Not sure but something about having lightening bolts on his shoes comes to mind…
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