Dell Launches New Storage and Networking Products

Dell-EqualLogic-PS6210

Dell's new EqualLogic PS6210 series arrays feature six models, with all-flash, hybrid and all-HDD options. (Photo: Dell)

At its annual Dell World event this week in Austin, Dell launched new storage and networking solutions, aimed at modernizing campus networks and offering improved economics for hardware refreshes. The event conversation can be followed on Twitter hashtag #DellWorld.

“Dell continues to be an increasingly important partner for enterprises of all sizes as we deliver innovative products to help customers solve problems in new ways,” said Marius Haas, chief commercial officer and president, Dell Enterprise Solutions. “Today’s announcements further redefine data center economics with technology that provides unsurpassed product functionality and lower total cost of ownership to power modern workloads through storage and networking innovation. Dell’s approach offers intelligent solutions that prepare customers with a future-ready data center built on a scalable architecture to support their data center growth.”

New Storage Platform

Dell introduced a new generation of EqualLogic Storage technologies, allowing customers to scale from small environments to large data centers. The new EqualLogic PS6210 series arrays feature six models, with  all-flash, hybrid and all-HDD options. The new arrays offer increased throughput and more memory than prior generations with a faster, more powerful storage controller.

Version 7.0 of Dell's EqualLogic Array software is released, for storage management and policy-based access controls. Version 3.0 of EqualLogic SAN Headquarters was also released, featuring Array Software 7.0 features support and Dell SupportAssist enhancements that improve Dell’s customer support with expanded automated support case creation and new case tracking.

New Networking Solutions

Anticipating the move to a 10GbE core campus network, Dell is introducing new campus solutions to accommodate new workloads, applications and delivery models. New Dell W-Series Gigabit Wireless Access Points deliver unprecedented data rates up to 1.3 Gigabits per second (Gbps) for end-to-end wireless infrastructure solutions utilizing the 802.11ac standard. Dell 220 series enterprise access points offer centralized configuration, data encryption, policy enforcement and network services, as well as distributed and centralized traffic forwarding.

New fully-redundant 1/10/40 GbE C-Series switches help customers  achieve high-performance aggregation and back-end infrastructure for end-user mobility, reducing bottlenecks and congestion with high density 10GbE and 40GbE operation. The new C-Series allow mix-and-match Ethernet expansion and deployment options, and readily support unified communication and collaboration and virtual desktop infrastructure across a global workforce with scalable user density and performance on-demand.

Dell says its agent-free embedded server management technology, iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller, will simplify systems management operations for environments of any scale – from one server to thousands – allowing administrators to decrease time from setup to production by more than 90 percent.

"As a Dell EqualLogic customer for several years, we have leveraged the technology to give our firm a distinct advantage over our competitors," said Rich Raether, director of Security and Network Services for Milwaukee-based Quarles & Brady. "We initially partnered with Dell to help reduce the complexity of our SAN environment, but EqualLogic filled many of our other needs including disaster recovery with offsite replication and elimination of backup tapes with SAN based snapshots. As we transition to 10GbE platforms, we are looking forward to new enhancements on the PS6210 and FS7610, including increased speed and capacity savings with compression and data deduplication. These features will make it easier for our engineers to deliver better services to our attorneys and make them more productive in servicing our clients."