Dell adds 6 Gbit/s SAS products to storage line-up

Dell has extended its storage portfolio with new Raid adapters and direct-attached storage (DAS) enclosures supporting the faster 6Gbit/s serial-attached SCSI (SAS) standard.

Available immediately, the new kit includes three PowerEdge Raid controllers for servers, plus two PowerVault enclosures for direct attachment of external storage to servers.

The products represent the first storage kit from Dell to use the relatively new 6Gbit/s SAS interface, but Howard Shoobe, senior manager for storage products at the firm, claimed that many rivals had rushed to market with products not properly integrated or tested.

"We are introducing a complete end-to-end solution so that customers get the benefits from day one," he said.

The importance of 6Gbit/s SAS is that customers get greater bandwidth and throughput, which boosts the number of input/output operations per second (IOPS) for applications such as databases and backup to disk, according to Dell.

"How quickly servers can do transactions is critical to the performance of key business applications," said Shoobe, claiming that the new products increase this by about 35 per cent from 35,000 IOPS to about 50,000.

The new products are aimed at a range of applications, including high-performance computing, but Shoobe said that the systems will also find their way into smaller businesses not yet ready to implement shared storage networks. Microsoft is recommending DAS as the way to backup data to disk from Exchange servers.

The PowerEdge Raid controllers consist of two internal adapters, the entry-level H200 and high-performance H700, plus a third, the H800, designed to connect external storage (such as the new PowerVault enclosures).

Meanwhile, the PowerVault MD1200 enclosure is designed for high capacity and versatile expansion, supporting a maximum 12 drives in its 2U enclosure, either 2.5in or 3.5in format.

The PowerVault MD1220 is designed for high performance, and supports a 24-drive small form factor array of 2.5in drives.

Both enclosures can be fitted with what Dell terms "nearline" SAS drives at 7.2K RPM, or 10K and 15K models. Alternatively, Flash solid state drives (SSDs) can be fitted.

"Lots of customers have now started using the combination of SSDs for 'hot' data, 2.5in hard drives for the majority of their data, and 3.5in drives for backup," said Shoobe.