According to the IDC’s second quarter storage tracker for 2014, the networked storage array is still losing revenue across the globe, albeit not as sharply as previous results showed earlier this year. However, the Europe, Middle East and African region (EMEA) and Latin America are showing growth in the storage sector which is in line with trends around business development and sustainable infrastructures.
“The storage market has been in a state of flux for the first two quarters of 2014 thanks to shifting economic sands and plenty of uncertainty about the recession and the rand,” says Othelo Vieira, Dell enterprise solutions specialist at Tarsus Technologies, distributor of Dell products. “That said, there is a need for South African organisations to grow and develop a rich storage architecture that is capable of tapping into Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT), both leading the way when it comes to corporate trends and investment over the next few years. Enterprises are looking for solutions that are scalable, powerful and flexible enough to cope with their data demands.”
Of course, most organisations are looking to upgrade legacy storage solutions that no longer offer the right amount of bandwidth and performance, but let’s not forget the importance of green IT credentials. The government’s carbon emissions tax is set to kick in during 2016, shareholders are expecting to see a commitment to a sustainable solution, and green IT offers the potential to save money and improve business processes over the long term. Modern storage solutions have been designed to meet these criteria, offering the South African business the perfect opportunity to compete sustainably on a global level.
“Dell is a market leader in storage solutions that are richly featured within affordable parameters, and their PowerVault modular storage range is no exception,” says Vieira. “The PowerVault MD3 series is the next generation of affordable storage, supporting 16GB fibre channel protocols as well as 10GB Internet (iSCSI) and 12GB Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and performance is almost twice as fast with the High-Performance Tiering (HPT) feature. They have also been designed to deliver a low carbon footprint in line with their green IT ethos and standards.”
The PowerVault MD series comes with enhanced software features to tap into the enterprise’s virtualisation requirements while offering additional security and scalable storage options. The Dynamic Disk Pools technology supports up to 20 disk pools and 120 Solid State Drives (SSDs) along with the added benefit of being the ideal data recovery tool in the event of failure.
“Dell has ensured that the feature set incorporated in the PowerVault MD series gives the organisation the freedom to create and control the virtual centre without loss of performance or risk,” says Vieira. “The systems can be scaled with a blend of 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch hard drives or SSDs, depending on your performance requirements, and will meet the needs of high-bandwidth applications.”
Performance, power, scalability and green credentials place the Dell PowerVault MD3 series among the leaders of the enterprise storage pack right now. The solution has been designed to suit an affordable price point while offering capacity, management and performance optimisation in one.
