Dell Storage Helps CIOs Achieve Price –Performance Balance

#Dell has recently come up with series of products in the storage space - #SCv2000, #SC9000 and more. Neeraj Matiyani, Director, Storage Solutions, Dell India, explains to CXO Today on how Dell’s latest storage offerings help CIOs meet the challenges in storage in terms of elasticity, cost and performance. Excerpts.

How good are the Disk IOPS of Dell Storage systems?

In the storage world, IOPS is often viewed as a key metric in the application productivity equation. In the real world, where customers have finite budgets and a driving imperative to optimize value for every dollar they spend, storage performance is as much about economics as it is about IOPS. Our storage systems come in several varieties individually designed to address differing customer needs. Some of our solutions include Solid state drives (SSDs), nearline SAS and Enterprise SATA. Dell’s enterprise-class SSDs are designed around enterprise application I/O (input/output) requirements with the primary attribute focus being on random I/O performance and reliability. SSDs offer exceptional performance; however, compared to hard disk drives (HDDs) they have much less capacity per drive, they are much more expensive and have a write endurance limit.

The Achilles’ heel of SSDs are their write performance. To rewrite an area of an SSD that has already been written, the data must be erased and then written. In order to overcome a portion of the write performance penalty, Dell enterprise SSD found across Dell PowerEdge, EqualLogic and Dell EMC, all employ a practice known as over-provisioning of Flash. This practice keeps native Flash capacity beyond the user-defined capacity, and utilizes the additional space as a scratch pad of sorts to quickly put down application write data on areas of Flash that are already in an erased state. The SSDs perform clean-up functions of this over-provisioned Flash space during time periods typically not impacting application performance. Other offering from us include SAS hard drives which are true dual-port full duplex capable devices. This means that both ports on a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drive can simultaneously send or receive data (host dependent).

Dell’s nearline Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), available in PowerEdge servers and PowerVault enclosures, is an enterprise hard drive combining the head, media and rotational speed of traditional enterprise-class Serial ATA (SATA) drives with the fully capable SAS interface typical of 10K/15K rpm SAS drives. These features provide a clear edge over enterprise SATA drives.

http://www.cxotoday.com/story/dell-storage-helps-cios-achieve-price-performance-balance/