Dell removes price barriersin enterprise flash adoption

Effort to overcomecostbarriers that have hampered broad adoption of enterprise flash storage arrays has startedyielding the expected resultsas Dell has removed price barriers for enterprise flash adoption. Accordingly, the the global availability of new enterprise classDell Storage all-flash array (AFA) configurations has been taggedat the relative price of $25,000 . With this development, Dell offerscustomersthelowest entry price for an all-flash mid-range solution by any major vendor.
“For years, price has been the number one barrier toenterprise flash adoption, and we are knocking down thesewalls to make the high performance, reliability and smaller footprint of flash practical for almost any workload,” Robin Kuepers, storageMarketing Director, Dell Europe, Middle East and Africa, (EMEA), said, adding that, “As Dell continues to bring down the costof enterprise class storage, we now offer customerstheindustry’s easiest touse and lowest costentry point into mid-range, all-flash enterprise arrays.”
This is even as customerscontinue to recognize Dell’s flash leadership, with the company being selectedas the top choice for deploying enterprise flash/SSDs for the second consecutiveyear, according to an October 2014 SSG-NOW independent survey of more than300 global IT leaders.
“Dell’s ability to disrupt the storageindustry with itsextremelyattractive and low entry price for its all-flash storage offerings is made all the more impressiveby its inclusion of enterprise-class featuresand functionality,” Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said.
According to him, “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”.
For Carmen Andreoli, Director ofinfrastructure and IT atELEAD1ONE, a leading provider of web-based automotive dealership software, “We were interestedin the Dell Storage SC Series, and decided tostart in our corporate office and call centrewith theSC4020 Flash-Optimised Solution that auto-tiers among write-intensive SSDs, read-intensive SSDs, and 7.2K HDD,”
“We stood-up the SC4020 in lessthan a day and then completedan entireonline migration of our virtualized environmentwithout any downtime in less than24 hours. The SC4020 has exceededour expectations– in both excellent performance and overall easeof use.
Dell’s Data Progression software letsthe array do what it needs to do to optimise drives for performance and cost, and freesup hours of our time every month.”
Andreoli informedthat both new AFA configurations are based on the Dell Storage SC4020 array, which includes 24 drive bays and dual controllersin a 2U chassis, plus all standard software, options, installation and three-years of Dell Copilot support.
Customers, Andreoli added may continue to expand theirDell Storage SC4020 AFA as an all-flash solution by adding additional read-intensive or write-intense drives or achieve additional costsavings at any time by automatically moving cold data toone or more optional tiers of traditional spinning disks.
The new Dell Storage SC4020 AFA configurations, according to Dell offeran 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 totalof 2.8 terabytes of raw capacity for an advertised street price of $25,000 The Dell Storage SC4020 Flash-Optimized AFA multi-tier configuration provides even fasterwrite performance, while continuing to optimize cost.