Tag: Exanet

Dell Storage Forum 2012 – day 2

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, data protection, Disk storage, Ethernet, FC, FCoE, File Storage

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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One platform to rule them all – Compellent&EqualLogic&Exanet from Dell

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, File Storage, Storage, Storage Features, System effectiveness, Systems
Compellent drive enclosure (c) 2010 Compellent (from Compellent.com)
Compellent drive enclosure (c) 2010 Compellent (from Compellent.com)

Dell and Compellent may be a great match because Compellent uses commodity hardware combined with specialized software to create their storage subsystem. If there’s any company out there that can take advantage of commodity hardware it’s probably Dell. (Of course Commodity hardware always loses in the end, but that’s another story).

Similarly, Dell’s EqualLogic iSCSI storage system uses commodity hardware to provide its iSCSI storage services.  It doesn’t take a big leap of imagination to have one storage system that combines the functionality of EqualLogic’s iSCSI and Compellent’s FC storage capabilities.  Of course there are others already doing this including Compellent themselves which have their own iSCSI support already built into their FC storage system.

Which way to integrate?

Does EqualLogic survive such a merger?  I think so.  It’s easy to imagine that Equal Logic may have the bigger market share today. If that’s so, the right thing might be  to merge Compellent FC functionality into EqualLogic.  If Compellent has the larger market, the correct approach is the opposite. The answer lies probably with a little of both.  It seems easiest to add iSCSI functionality to a FC storage system than the converse but the FC to iSCSI approach may be the optimum path for Dell, because of the popularity of their EqualLogic storage.

What about NAS?

The only thing missing from this storage system is NAS.  Of course the Compellent storage offers a NAS option through the use of a separate Windows Storage Server (WSS) front end.  Dell’s EqualLogic does the much the same to offer NAS protocols for their iSCSI system.  Neither of these are bad solutions but they are not a fully integrated NAS offering such as available from NetApp and others.

However, there is a little discussed part, the Dell-Exanet acquisition which happened earlier this year. Perhaps the right approach is to integrate Exanet with Compellent first and target this at the high end enterprise/HPC market place, keeping Equal Logic at the SMB end of the marketplace.  It’s been a while since I have heard about Exanet, and nothing since the acquisition earlier this year.  Does it make sense to backend a clustered NAS solution with FC storage – probably.

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Much of this seems doable to me, but it all depends on taking the right moves once the purchase is closed.   But if I look at where Dell is weakest (baring their OEM agreement with EMC), it’s in the highend storage space.  Compellent probably didn’t have much of a foot print there as possible due to their limited distribution and support channel.  A Dell acquisition could easily eliminate these problems and open up this space without having to do much other than start to marketing, selling and supporting Compellent.

In the end, a storage solution supporting clustered NAS, FC, and iSCSI that combined functionality equivalent to Exanet, Compellent and EqualLogic based on commodity hardware (ouch!) could make a formidable competitor to what’s out there today if done properly. Whether Dell could actually pull this off and in a timely manner even if they purchase Compellent, is another question.

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