Dell Expands Big Data Portfolio

Corporations are dealing with a flood of data, which all needs to be stored and analyzed. Dell wants a piece of that business, and on Monday announced a new Big Data Retention solution aimed at helping customers better  manage large datasets for easy retrieval and analysis.

Big Data Retention combines Dell Storage with RainStor database technology, producing simplified data management and scalability. This allows customers to migrate to complex analytics like the Dell Cloudera management platform, Hadoop solutions, or Dell's Crowbar deployment toolkit. The further adoption of big data analytics will ultimately place enormous demands on IT to change the way data is stored and managed.

“Not only are the volumes of data growing – so is its value to the organization,” said Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager, Dell Enterprise Storage. “Being able to cost-effectively capture and store all of the relevant data makes it possible to gain insights that support innovation and business value. The key is having the right data management solution to fluidly move data, tier it, dedupe it, protect it and archive it. To us, that means your data is fluid.”

The Dell Big Data Retention solution can provide an average data compression ratio of up to 40 to 1, freeing up space to accelerate query access for analytics. The RainStor database provides online data retention at a massive scale, with unlimited scalability and zero administration. It can be deployed on any combination of Dell servers and storage, on premise or in a cloud configuration. When added to Dell's DX Object Storage Platform customers can add capacity in amounts as small as 2TB, scaling up to petabytes and to billions of objects without the set-up and management complexity and costs of traditional file and block storage.

“Dell’s best-in-class servers and storage are a perfect complement to RainStor’s Big Data database,” said Ramon Chen, vice president of product management at RainStor. “With RainStor’s ability to run on any storage platform, customers can choose the combined solution that will meet their business needs at the lowest total operating cost."