Technology & IT | Thursday 22 January, 2015 12:01 am |

Delivering on its commitment to transform the storage industry with industry-leading customer value and economics, Dell today announced the global availability of new enterprise class Dell Storage all-flash array (AFA) configurations starting at only $25,000 (US). With this launch, Dell offers customers the lowest entry price for an all-flash mid-range solution by any major vendor.1

“For years, price has been the number one barrier to enterprise flash adoption, and we’re knocking down these walls to make the high performance, reliability and smaller footprint of flash practical for almost any workload,” said Robin Kuepers, storage marketing director, Dell EMEA. “As Dell continues to bring down the cost of enterprise class storage, we now offer customers the industry’s easiest to use and lowest cost entry point into mid-range, all-flash enterprise arrays.”

Customers continue to recognise Dell’s flash leadership, with the company being selected as the top choice for deploying enterprise flash/SSDs for the second consecutive year, according to an October 2014 SSG-NOW independent survey of more than 300 global IT leaders.3

"Dell's ability to disrupt the storage industry with its extremely attractive and low entry price for its all-flash storage offerings is made all the more impressive by its inclusion of enterprise-class features and functionality,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Given the overall value proposition—which is bolstered by Dell's renowned Copilot support—IT users around the globe should certainly give consideration to Dell when looking for AFA solutions."

Dell Storage Offers Affordable Enterprise Flash Arrays for All Customers
The new Dell Storage SC4020 AFA configurations offer an economical starting point for all-flash performance to support a wide range of applications and workloads. Dell is now shipping two options:

The Dell Storage SC4020 Entry-Level AFA single-tier configuration includes six 480GB read-intensive SSDs for a total of 2.8 terabytes of raw capacity for an advertised street price of $25,000 (US).
The Dell Storage SC4020 Flash-Optimised AFA multi-tier configuration provides even faster write performance, while continuing to optimise cost, with six 480GB read-intensive SSDs, plus an additional six 200GB write-intensive SSDs for a total of more than 4 terabytes of raw capacity and an advertised street price of $35,000 (US).

Both new AFA configurations are based on the Dell Storage SC4020 array, which includes 24 drive bays and dual controllers in a 2U chassis, plus all standard software, options, installation and three-years of Dell Copilot support.

Customers may continue to expand their Dell Storage SC4020 AFA as an all-flash solution by adding additional read-intensive or write-intense drives – or achieve additional cost savings at any time by automatically moving cold data to one or more optional tiers of traditional spinning disks. In either case, all incoming writes and “hot reads” are handled by the fastest SSD tier, ensuring maximum application performance.

Additional Quotes:

“We were interested in the Dell Storage SC Series, and decided to start in our corporate office and call centre with the SC4020 Flash-Optimised Solution that auto-tiers among write-intensive SSDs, read-intensive SSDs, and 7.2K HDD,” said Carmen Andreoli, director of infrastructure and IT at ELEAD1ONE, a leading provider of web-based automotive dealership software. “We stood-up the SC4020 in less than a day and then completed an entire online migration of our virtualised environment without any downtime in less than 24 hours. The SC4020 has exceeded our expectations – in both excellent performance and overall ease of use. Dell’s Data Progression software lets the array do what it needs to do to optimise drives for performance and cost, and frees up hours of our time every month.”
“Dell is the only manufacturer that utilises both write intensive and read intensive SSD technologies in a single array and enables us to configure exactly the solution our customers need, not a ‘one size fits all’ approach as other storage vendors offer,” said Paul Clifford, President, The Davenport Group, a Dell PartnerDirect Premier Partner. “The flexibility is built-in so that as a customer’s needs change, which is inevitable, the system can be easily adapted. It is the reason that Dell Storage continues to lead the way in performance, flexibility, and price. This latest Dell Storage SC4020 announcement brings an all-flash array to customers at a $25,000 price point, and the customers have all the flexibility, features, and growth opportunities of a full enterprise implementation.”