Dell expands PowerVault DAS range
Includes 6Gbit/s SAS for the first time.
By Maxwell Cooter | Techworld | Published: 10:37, 15 January 2010
Dell has launched its first product with 6Gbit/s SAS drives, enclosures and RAID controllers.
The company has launched a new range of its PowerVault direct-attached storage (DAS) series including the new standard, which was ratified last year.
It looks like Dell has been slow off the mark to launch 6Gig SAS but Howard Schoobe,Dell's senior storage product manager said that the company was only interested in releasing technology when it was ready to be used by customers. He said that while competitors had released 6Gig SAS products, Dell wanted to release the complete range. "It's no good releasing a 6 Gig controller, if you have no 6 Gig drives," he said. "We're releasing a fully-tested 6Gig solution."
Key to the new release is the boost in I/O operations per second (IOPS) performance. "We've increased I/O operations from 35,000 to 55,000 per second. That's going to be of benefit for a variety of applications - we're seeing companies using it for OLTP but it can even be used for improving email. We've seen customers in trading environments using it to increase the number of trades per server, for example."
Schoobe said that the increase in I/O was an important part of the new product. "IOS is more often the bottleneck in performance rather than throughput," he said.
Another key aspect of the new range is that ability to mix up drives, said Schoobe. "This improves the efficiency, customers can use a combination of SSDs and 2.5inch drives,"
The new range includes five products: three PowerEdge RAID controllers (PERC): H200, H700 and H800 andtwo PowerVault enclosures, the MD1200 and MD1220, for external storage expansion.
