Only months after launching the Datacenter Scalable Solutions (DSS) line of business, Dell’s investment in high performance computing for mainstream enterprise applications appears to be paying off.
Since the announcement in August, the division’s business has been growing at 800 percent, Jyeh Gan, director of Datacenter Scalable Solutions at Dell, told EnterpriseTech during Dell World. DSS added 50 more customer engagements since August, he said.
“It’s a little bit of an untapped market,” James Mouton, vice president and general manager of DSS, told EntepriseTech.
During Dell World, the vendor unveiled the first products in its DSS family, alluded to during EnterpriseTech’s interview with Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, vice president and general manager of servers at Dell, earlier this month.
The Dell DSS7000, said to be the industry’s densest storage server, is based on the DCS X490 and can provide up to 720 terabytes of storage in one 4U chassis. It includes up to 90 hot-serviceable 3.5-inch drives and two 2-socket server nodes designed to give cloud builders a low dollar-per-gigabyte cost for object and block storage, according to Dell.
In addition, Dell unveiled the DSS 1500, DSS 1510, and DSS 2500 – new 1U and 2U servers that provide flexible storage and IO options, standard baseboard management, BMC controller systems management, and today’s Intel Xeon processors.
To complement these new servers, Dell took the wraps off the Dell Storage SC9000, featuring two active controllers per array, 2U chassis, Dell Storage Center 6.7 or greater operating system, dual 3.2GHz, 8-core Intel processors per controller, 128GB or 256GB per controller (for 256GB or 512GB total per array), and the ability to support application acceleration via Dell Fluid Cache for SAN integration, including snapshot protection for cache data and unified management, Dell said.
Based on the 13th generation of Dell’s PowerEdge server, the SC9000 provides all-flash and hybrid flash options to deliver 40 percent more IOPS, according to Dell. Architected for demanding large-scale workloads, it supports more than 3 petabytes of raw capacity per array and enterprises can scale it out further via federated multi-array configurations that use seamless volume movement between themselves.
To further support HPC datacenter customers, Dell rolled out Dell Storage Center 6.7 array software, crafted to enhance support for private clouds and mission critical applications. Enhancements include Live Volume auto-failover designed to eliminate workload downtime in disaster recovery scenarios, plus integrated host-side data protection for Oracle, Microsoft, and VMware environments. The solution’s active data-compression capabilities now give enterprises up to 93 percent flash capacity savings and TLC 3D NAND technology for additional cost savings, said the company.
To round out its datacenter focus, the Austin, Texas-based developer enhanced its Dell Data Protection-Rapid Recovery software that is designed to reduce downtime.
Rapid Snap for Applications technology, found within Rapid Recovery, can encapsulate an application and relevant state in order to provide application and system recovery with aggressive RPOs and near-zero RTOs, according to Dell. With Rapid Snap for Virtual, based on vRanger, enterprises access scalable protection of VMware environments without agents, and can automatically detect and back up virtual machines provisioned on ESXi hosts. Rapid Recovery Repository (R3) includes encryption and client-side deduplication to deliver direct-to-target backups, reducing the dedupe workload for faster snapshots, shorter data transfer times, and bigger scale, the vendor said.
On the software-defined storage front, Dell shared its next iteration of Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances, targeted at enterprises that want hyperconverged solutions – a market expected to reach $3.9 billion by 2019, up 60 percent from last year, according to IDC. These devices include the XC6320, which has four compute nodes and supports more than 44 terabytes of storage in a 2U form factor. As a result, the XC6320 curtails datacenter hardware rack space, power, and cooling requirements. The new Dell XC630-10F and XC6320-6F All-Flash Nodes are the developer’s first XC Series all-flash appliances, designed to offer a cost-for-performance boost via data-tiering between flash drives types based on actual data usage.
This article is an excerpt of a longer piece that was published on our sister publication, EnterpriseTech.