Dell overhauls enterprise storage line-up

Dell has announced updates to its enterprise storage portfolio with an overhaul of its Compellent platform to support a much larger storage space, a new disk-based backup appliance utilising file-aware optimisation, plus a solution for optimising SharePoint performance.

At its first Dell Storage Forum event in London, the firm discussed its enterprise storage strategy and detailed new and updated products that form part of this vision, including cross-fertilising technologies from its recent acquisitions to build a stronger product portfolio.

Heading up the announcements is Dell Compellent Storage Center 6.0, a new version of the automated tiering platform that powers the Compellent storage arrays.

With version 6.0, the platform is extended to 64-bit block addressing, enabling it to support up to 16 exabytes of storage.

"Increasing the address space is important for customers looking to scale up, as our platform stores a lot of metadata that determines which blocks get moved to which tier in the storage hierarchy," explained Bob Fine, director of product marketing for Dell Compellent.

Storage Center 6.0 also now features full support for VMware's vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), which speeds operations such as cloning virtual machines by up to 48 per cent by offloading the entire process to the storage array itself.

The new platform will be available later this quarter to all Dell Compellent customers with a current support contract, and is a non-disruptive upgrade thanks to the Compellent dual-controller architecture.

Each controller can be taken offline and upgraded in turn, while the remaining unit continues to service data requests, Fine said.