Mark Davison at Dell’s Enterprise Forum, Frankfurt – As traditional IT intersects the new IT that is being thrust upon us by trends such as cloud, big data and mobility, what customers most need is bridging technologies between what they already have and what they need to invest in. And Dell yesterday launched one of the first of these new technologies – Dell Fluid Cache for SAN.
“As we look at the intersection of traditional IT and this new IT, no-one is going to throw away what they’ve got,” says Alan Atkinson, vice-president and GM of Dell Storage. “We need to squeeze existing IT for every terabyte, milk that infrastructure for all it’s worth – that infrastructure is not going away.
“What most customers need is a bridge with what they’ve already got and what they need to invest in,” Atkinson says. “It’s about optimising for today to be ready for tomorrow. We know that you have to redo applications; that you have to put things in the cloud. But I don’t believe the new generation data centre will take 100% of this load any more than I believe that the mainframe is going to disappear.”
What he does believe, though, is that storage will have a crucial role to play.
“We’re redefining the storage economy,” he says. “We’ve put flash within the rack, and now we’re bringing it down to disk level. We’ve had nine major releases in eight months and we’ve effectively overhauled our storage offering.”
Dell Fluid Cache for SAN “is a technology that takes application acceleration from hours to minutes; provisioning from minutes to seconds”.
It brings data closer to the server while improving application performance and reducing response times.
Helping address performance issues that customers face with applications requiring fast access to data, such as online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and cloud, this technology helps organisations speed up access to data by pooling and utilising Dell PCI Express Flash drives for low-latency data caching inside traditional servers.
Dell Fluid Cache for SAN has achieved 5 million random read input/output per second (IOPS) and can reduce cost per user by up to 71%. Dell lab tests also revealed improved database average response times capable of 99% while allowing a more than six-fold increase in the number of concurrent users – increasing from just 2 200 to 14 000 users.
By providing a single infrastructure for data at both high and low ends of the performance spectrum, Dell Fluid Cache for SAN eliminates the trade-offs between server performance and full-featured SAN benefits such as reliability, manageability and data protection.
Intelligent data placement from the server to SAN can enable customers to significantly improve performance while reducing solution costs by enabling the right data to reside at the right place at the right time.
A single management interface and fully integrated SAN capabilities, including automated tiering, cache-aware snapshots, replication and compression, also helps customers save time and resources with the advantages of excellent application performance and Dell’s advanced storage economics.
Bringing the most frequently accessed data closer to compute resources minimises data travel from storage to the server and enables customers to:
* Improve performance – deliver critical results faster, boost transactional performance and reduce response times by leveraging the end-to-end capabilities of Dell PowerEdge servers with Dell Express Flash PCIe SSDs, Dell Networking 10/40GbE switches and Dell Compellent Data Progression intelligent tiering technology.
* Ensure data integrity – maintain confidence that the cache pool data is highly available and safeguarded by write-back caching technology, with no single point of failure from server to SAN.
* Enhance flexibility – enable database and virtualization performance scalability on demand with a SAN-based solution that allows for the addition of drives and nodes to be added to an active cache pool as needed, allowing business to grow as demand dictates.
* Maximise storage investment – extend the power of Dell intelligent data placement from the SAN to the server, allowing data to be managed holistically and reside on optimal drive types based on actual performance needs to lower overall total storage costs.
