Reading Time: 2 minutesDell announce the new Equallogic array with the introduction of 2.5-inch drive support, providing greater density that enables users to store more in less space. New storage arrays include:
- EqualLogic PS4100 Series — ideal for small-to-medium businesses or remote office locations with growing storage needs. The SANs, supporting up to 36TB in a single array and 72TB in a single group, can scale as storage demands increase by seamlessly adding additional PS4100 or PS6100 arrays into an EqualLogic group.
- EqualLogic PS6100 Series — designed to provide mid-sized customers with a scalable storage environment, up to 72TB in a single array and 1.2PB in a single group, that can easily accommodate both high-performance and high-capacity drive options. The PS6100 family is ideal for customers looking for a storage solution to support the storage demands of a highly virtualized data center environment where the seamless movement and protection of virtual machines, applications and data is crucial.
With the newly redesigned, compact form factor, PS6100 customers can achieve the same performance for their typical workload using half the number of arrays, and receive 50 percent more expansion capacity when compared with the previous generation EqualLogic arrays. Customers can gain up to 60 percent performance improvement on typical workloads with the EqualLogic PS Series compared to the previous generation EqualLogic arrays. The new controller type of the PS6100 series has now 8 GB of cache (the PS6000 series has 4 GB and the PS4000 “only” 2 GB).
Those new Equallogic are equiped with the new 5.1 firmware that include new specific API for vSphere integration, like vSphere Storage API – Storage Awareness (VASA) for thin provisioning awareness and new vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI). Note that this improvement are firmware related, so can be applied also to old Equallogic series (if the controller can be upgraded to the new 5.1 firmware).
Dell also has begun shipping the new EqualLogic FS7500, the company’s latest NAS solution that works with EqualLogic PS Series arrays to deliver the only scale-out, unified storage platform for mid-size deployments. The FS7500 uses the Dell Scalable File System, which offers several advanced features including cache monitoring, load balancing and multi-threading for fast I/O processing.
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