Dell expands Software-Defined Storage portfolio

Dell has introduced its second wave of Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances. These highly scalable integrated solutions help streamline the data centre and now offer more than 50 percent storage capacity and up to twice the rack density to support customers deploying a wide range of workloads, including virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI), private cloud and big data.

The new Dell XC Series Version 2.0 appliances offer customers hyper-converged solutions based for the first time on Dell PowerEdge 13th generation server technology combined with Nutanix software and Dell global services and support. The appliances integrate enterprise-class storage, compute and hypervisor resources into a single solution, and further expand Dell’s broad software-defined storage (SDS) portfolio.

“We’ve seen strong customer interest in our debut Dell XC Series appliances, and our newest offerings substantially raise the bar,” said Alan Atkinson, vice president and general manager, Dell Storage. “The new web-scale converged appliances add greater configuration flexibility and pack more performance and capacity into our 13th generation servers, making them even more compelling for customers looking to adopt a newer, integrated systems model for delivering IT to their organisations.”

Customers’ interest in integrated systems continues to grow with the opportunity to deploy simplified yet powerful solutions that offer high performance, fast deployment and lower operational costs. In fact, the Dell XC Series offers up to 27 per cent lower cost and up to six times faster time to value compared to a traditional VDI solution approach according to recent analysis from IT research firm Wikibon.

The next wave of the Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances offers customers a broader range of integrated solutions for various workloads in virtualized environments. This includes the new Dell XC Series XC630 and XC730xd, built on Dell PowerEdge 13th generation server technology. The appliances offer substantial enhancements to the debut XC Series and support customers with:
• Faster application performance—Higher performance servers and additional drives options (flash and hard disk) support more demanding workloads in VDI, private cloud and big data initiatives.
• Greater density—Doubling the density to 16 terabytes per rack unit, supports the same amount of data in half the rack space, benefiting all types of customers, and especially managed service providers and those in co-located data centres.
• Greater flexibility—Industry advances in processing and memory combined with multiple drive, memory and processor options per appliance enable more precise workload matching and granular scalability.

The new Dell XC630 introduces a compact 1U form factor to the XC Series portfolio and supports more virtual desktop users in half the rack space compared to Dell’s debut XC720xd, making it an even more attractive option for customers with limited rack space or those deploying VDI and other virtualized workloads. The new Dell XC730xd (2U) can support 60 percent more storage—up to 32 terabytes—compared to the previous generation, benefitting many customers, especially those deploying private cloud or big data workloads.

The Dell XC Series is designed to be easily deployed and incrementally scaled, lowering total cost of ownership and supporting the agility for customers to simply add new appliances in minutes in a “pay-as-you-grow” model. Customers can deploy multiple virtualized workloads using the same infrastructure and can easily respond to business changes by scaling their IT environment one node at time without the need to overprovision based on anticipated growth.

The appliances enable customers to manage their virtual environments at a VM level, making them ideal for VDI, private cloud, high performance server virtualization, and data centres using multiple hypervisor platforms. Initial customers hail from a wide range of industries including large financial services, manufacturing and media companies.

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