Dell EMC has probably a storage portfolio too rich and with some overlaps, due to the EMC acquisition, and I was quite sure that the Dell PowerVault MD storage series was destined for early obsolescence to be replaced by the Compellent series.
But obviously, I was wrong. Dell EMC announced a new PowerVault line: Dell EMC PowerVault ME4.
As the previous PowerVault MD series, also the new PowerVault ME4 (very strange name) is targeted for the specific SMB market.
SMB market is challenging: “We have the same needs as large enterprises, but we have to meet business expectations with a significantly smaller IT budget and staff.”
Customers need solutions that truly offer the best mix of price/performance for business workloads.
And the new Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 Series storage arrays purpose-built and priced for small- and medium-sized businesses.
It’s simple, as usual. Customer installable in 15 minutes; manage from anywhere with a new simple web-based user-interface.
But it’s also fast enough for the SMB. Optimized for SAN and Direct-Attach Storage to Dell EMC PowerEdge servers to support a wide range of business applications and use cases. PowerVault ME4 Series can expand up to 4PB and drive up to 320,000 IOPs.
And it’s affordable. Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 Series minimum configurations are available starting at under USD $13,000 (List Price) or also less with the SAS controller.
This new storage family comes with significant enhancements over current Dell EMC entry systems in capacity, performance, simplicity, and features. It includes the ME4012 (2U/12 drives), ME4024 (2U/24 drives) and the dense ME4084 (5U/84drives) base systems.
The feature capabilities are similar to the previous MD series with an interesting news in the tiering option, not only caching but now 3 tiers!
More interesting is the front-end connectivity, with the traditional FC8 and FC16, 10 Gbps iSCSI and SAS 12 Gbps, with with a new SAS option up to 8 hosts!
Note that the new PowerVault support ONLY PowerEdge G13 or G14!
One curious aspect is about the controller, but actually, I cannot find any specific information. The previous PowerVault MD series was based on LSI controller (licensend by NetApp). For this new series, I’ve no idea about which type of controllers is used.
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