Hello EQL Family,
Dell’s EqualLogic™ product suite continues to drive innovation by delivering all the functionality and enterprise-class features of its traditional rack-based arrays in a new blade chassis form factor product.
The newest member of the Dell EqualLogic PS Series family is the scalable and easy-to-manage Dell EqualLogic PS-M4110 blade array designed for use with the Dell PowerEdge™ M1000e blade chassis product.
The PS-M4110 is targeted at small to medium blade chassis customers demanding shared storage with advanced features at lower cost and with lower space, heating, and electrical requirements than other
storage products on the market. The tight integration of PS-M4110 along with the Dell M-Series chassis and blade servers presents some new and unique use cases for shared storage.
Of particular interest is a use case for a completely converged server, network, and storage infrastructure called data center-in-a-box. In this deployment model, the M1000e, along with integrated servers, networking,
and shared storage, becomes a modular building block for customers wanting to grow their infrastructure – virtual or physical – as they need additional capacity while minimizing the data center impact in terms
of power, cooling, and rack space.
The idea is to converge blade form factor servers, storage and networking hardware inside a single rack mount enclosure or chassis that can be bought, installed and managed as a single system.
This is easier to do than buying, installing and managing the components individually, and makes sense when you're buying lots of the stuff or need a single miniaturised data centre.
The perceived competition is the HP StorageWorks D2200sb storage blade and Dell has commissioned a comparison report (pdf) from Principled Technologies that shows its PS-M41100 blade:
- has 55 per cent fewer storage configuration steps
- supports 48 per cent more users
- supports 42 per cent more users per watt
- has up to 96 per cent more usable capacity
Additionally, the PS-M4110 received a 9.0 overall Excellent grade and Editor's choice from InfoWorld.
Reference architecture overview
The Storage Interoperability Lab conducted tests on a self-contained M1000e
based data center-in-a-box architecture that included testing of multiple different networking components as well as using blade servers from the latest two generations of M-Series blade servers.
Two PS-M4110 Storage Blades, running array firmware version 6.0.1, were installed
in the M1000e Blade Chassis.
The tests were designed to validate the PS-M4110 Storage Blade interoperability with NIC/CNA’s and IO Modules .
The PS-M4110 Storage Blade will provide features/functionality consistent with the PS4000 family and will align with the EQ family values including all inclusive pricing,
ease of setup and management, Enterprise class high performance and 5-9s reliability.
PS-M4110 will follow the PS4000 support model today which allows for support of PS6000 features (additional members, volumes, snapshots, replication target volumes and volume
connections per group) when joined to a PS6000 group outside of the blade chassis. This auto adjustment of array profiles to align to PS6000 family values must be transparent to the customer.
The main benefits of PS-M4110 Blade Array vs competitor’s storage blade solutions are in the ease of use/management and the fact that the PS-M4110 provides a consistent storage
management utility for remote office and data center storage solutions enabling high end features such as snapshots and array based replication.
The PS-M4110 will provide the same level of data and array security provided by racked based PS products
Get the full report and reference architecture HERE:
Until Next Time,
Guy Westbrook
Twitter: @GuyAtDell
Email: guy_westbrook@dell.com
Chatter: @EQL Tech Enablement
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