Dell Unveils Intelligent Data Management Solutions For The Virtual Era, Helping Customers Make Information More Valuable

Dell today unveiled Intelligent Data Management solutions to help customers facing unprecedented challenges storing and managing data transform that information into a strategic asset.

Applications for creating and consuming digital content, increased server virtualization, and computer-driven services are causing exponential data growth, particularly in unstructured data such as files, images and movies.

• According to IDC, at nearly 500 exabytes – or 500 billion gigabytes – the “Digital Universe,” if converted to pages of text and assembled into books, would stretch to Pluto and back 10 times. IDC estimates that the Digital Universe will double every 18 months.¹
• A University of California–Santa Cruz study shows 90 percent of data is never accessed after initial opening.²
• According to an independent report from Forrester Research, Inc. published in February 2010, Controlling Storage Costs Amid High Growth, storage budgets have increased from 10 percent of the IT hardware budget in 2007 to 17 percent of the IT hardware budget in 2009.³
• ESG’s 2010 IT Spending Intentions Survey shows the top five priorities for this year (in order) are: increase use of virtualization, information security initiatives, improve data backup and recovery, upgrade network infrastructure, and manage data growth.⁴

This scenario creates three primary problems customers are struggling to manage: volume, access and protection. With this in mind, Dell’s Intelligent Data Management solutions, including comprehensive services and systems, will share fundamental principles based on:

• Integrated design: Common architecture and feature integration for predictable costs, almost limitless scalability and seamless management.
• Automated data management: Policy-based automation designed to seamlessly and transparently move and reduce data throughout the data tiers.
• Partnered ecosystem: Industry standards enable seamless integration with best-of-breed partners and technologies through Dell’s portfolio.

Dell designed its solutions to create new levels of access, availability and protection, while helping reduce and operating expenses. Dell’s initial data management solutions complement its EqualLogic, Dell | EMC and PowerVault offerings and address three critical storage technology areas: object storage, deduplication and unified storage.

Object Storage

Object storage allows the attachment of metadata, which is additional identifying information, to a file. The system then stores the object in an enormous, flat address space. Dell believes that the benefits of object storage will lead to widespread adoption of this technology for fixed digital content.

Today Dell announced its plans to deliver the Dell™ DX Object Storage Solution, designed to access, store and distribute billions of files or other digital content, from archiving to the cloud. The Dell DX Object Storage Solution uses a simple, self-managing, expandable and cost-effective peer-scaling architecture .

The Dell DX Object Storage Solution helps customers:

• Identify and retrieve information quickly by using metadata and affordable disk storage in a nearline setting.
• Automatically manage data from creation through deletion with a goal of reducing management by 50 percent. The platform is designed to meet data management and governance needs with automated policy-based retention and deletion and selectable write-once-read-many, at an affordable price.
• Employ multiple options for scaling capacity that can extend to billions of files and petabytes of storage. To help reduce setup and management complexity, the DX Object Storage Solution is self-healing, uses wizard-based setup and does not require LUNs or RAID groups.
• Avoid the cost and complexity of forklift upgrades with scalable storage investments that have the ability to seamlessly incorporate new technology. The DX Object Storage Solution is built on a flexible, peer-scaling architecture using industry standards-based hardware and integrated software in one end-to-end solution.

Dell is actively building an ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs) to develop horizontal and vertical solutions around its object platform. As part of this effort, Dell is launching a solution development kit (SDK) for its partners. The solution uses an open HTTP interface that simplifies and minimizes the integration effort.

Dell is currently working to integrate with the Dell DX Object Storage Solution with industry leaders including:

• Acuo
• Bridgehead Software
• CommVault
• EMC
• Iron Mountain
• Karos Health
• Moonwalk
• OpenText
• Stealth Software
• StoredIQ
• Symantec
• Teramedica

Initially, Dell will release DX Object Storage solutions for healthcare, file and email archiving, eDiscovery and content management in the first half of this year. Dell plans to work with additional ISVs to deliver an increasing range of solutions.

As an example, The University of Utrecht in the Netherlands fosters innovative research that contributes to economic development and the solution of social issues such as climate change, infectious diseases, the ageing population and public health.

“Object-based storage is the perfect fit for our lab’s needs: we have millions of large files, and they don’t change much. With the Dell DX Object Storage Platform, we gain the cost-effective scalability and easy accessibility our researchers need for working with tremendous amounts of data,” said Henk van den Toorn, Post-Doctoral Bioinformatician, Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics. “By adding standards-based nodes, we have the flexibility to expand our research or launch new projects without having to make the major hardware investments that other solutions require.”

Dell has also built ProConsult™ professional services for data archiving that include assessment, design and data migration. Dell ProConsult also supports Healthcare Integrated Content Archiving through engagements with consultants formerly with Perot Healthcare consulting.

Deduplication

Deduplication helps eliminate common data at file, block and sub-block levels enabling a reduction of the total capacity required to store and protect data. Customers should understand their goals and the problems they need to solve when it comes to data protection, growth and management in order to decide how to best deploy technologies like deduplication. Dell’s ProConsult services can help customers on this path to storage optimization with workshops, design and implementation.

As part of today’s announcement Dell introduced new deduplication offerings including an expansion of its relationship with EMC.

The Dell|EMC DD Series includes three mature, easy-to-use backup-to-disk solutions with integrated deduplication. Based on EMC’s Data Domain Series, the Dell|EMC DD140, DD610 and DD630, are designed to improve data protection and recovery time while helping customers:

• Achieve massive backup data reduction with integrated, in-line deduplication.
• Employ cost-effective replication by reducing bandwidth requirements.
• Implement with ease via support for almost any backup and archive software without having to redesign the backup environment.

Dell also recently introduced enhancements to its PowerVault DL2100, a new single-system backup-to-disk solution that combines world-class hardware and software from Symantec and CommVault, to help customers store, protect and archive data.

• The PowerVault DL2100 Powered by Symantec Backup Exec 2010 is designed to reduce the time and costs associated with maintaining and recovering data from tape-based systems by providing customers with:
  • A disk-based backup solution with true source deduplication that can reduce backup costs by up to 50% compared to tape solutions⁵.
  • Seamless integration with the Dell EqualLogic and Dell|EMC families of storage arrays and VMware vSphere virtualization solutions.
• Upgrades to the PowerVault DL2100 Powered by CommVault Simpana 8 can provide application-aware snapshot management and enable Dell PowerVault customers to leverage a secure, cost-effective tier of cloud storage
  • The PowerVault DL2100 Powered by CommVault Simpana software seamlessly integrates the Simpana SnapProtect client with the Dell EqualLogic PS Series family of iSCSI SANs to provide new high speed recovery options and streamlined data protection. By leveraging these snapshots in Simpana software, customers may perform granular application-aware recoveries for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle and Windows, Linux and Unix file system environments. These same snapshot copies can also be automatically moved to deduplicated disk, tape or cloud storage.

Unified Storage

Unified storage promises an integrated platform that simplifies data management, offers built-in tiering and deduplication across multiple data types, such as block or file, and various storage protocols. Today Dell introduced Dell|EMC NS Series, an efficient platform for consolidating a wide array of environments and applications.

Dell|EMC NS Series, including the NS-120, NS-480 and NS-960 allows customers to:

• Pay for only what they need by removing unnecessary costs associated with multiple storage systems, duplicate data and over-provisioning;
• Meet the most demanding service levels with high availability and flexible connectivity through UltraFlex I/O modules and;
• Save time managing storage by streamlining operations with Automated Volume Management and increase storage efficiency in your VMware environments with the Celerra plug-in for VMware.

Dell also announced the PowerVault NX3100 a capacity-dense, dedicated NAS solution to handle multiple data types (block and file) in a single system. This helps customers with limited resources save time and money by not having to manage separate systems for different data types. Its integrated, advanced file-sharing software - including features such as Single Instance Storage and built-in reporting through File Services Resource Manager - is designed to help smaller offices stay efficient and productive

• The PowerVault NX3100 is built for capacity with up to 24TB internally and up to 384TB externally.
• For additional expansion, Dell has validated the NX3100 with its PowerVault, EqualLogic and EMC families giving customers the flexibility to choose the best fit for their environments.

Quotes

Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager, Dell Enterprise Storage - “Our customers are experiencing massive data growth, and new requirements to retain, protect, and discover their information is continuing to compound the data management challenge. Our new products in this space will provide comprehensive solutions that allow customers to simplify and gain control of their data management. We will enable them to keep more data online as well as comprehend and understand its value. The end result is turning information into an asset that customers can actually use to help them make decisions and drive innovation.”

Jeffrey Casale, EMC, Senior Vice President for Channels and OEMs - "Unified storage and deduplication are two of the hottest areas in information storage right now because of the flexibility, ease of management and cost-savings they deliver in virtual data center and cloud computing environments. EMC and Dell have forged one of the most successful relationships ever in the IT industry because of a shared commitment to providing customers with leading edge solutions that help them address their most pressing information management challenges. Co-branded versions of our leading Data Domain deduplication and Celerra unified storage technologies are the latest expansion of a relationship that began in 2001 and reflect our continued commitment to helping our mutual customers get the most value from their information in the most cost-effective manner."

Richard Villars, vice president, Storage Systems & Executive Strategies – “The explosion in digital content and new data retention requirements is driving rapid data growth in many organizations. Simply purchasing more disk capacity is no longer an acceptable solution for IT professionals, however. They need to take a holistic approach to data management that maximizes efficiency and recognizes the different importance of diverse sets of data. Dell is offering a wide range of solutions from primary storage to archives to the cloud that can help implement and manage efficient yet scalable storage environments.”

Availability

• The Dell DX Object Storage Platform is expected in the second quarter of this year. The SDK will be available in April.
• The Dell|EMC DD Series models are available now.
• The Dell PowerVault DL2100 Powered by Symantec Backup Exec 2010 and CommVault Simpana 8 are available now.
• The Dell |EMC NS-120 and NS-480 are planned for April. The NS960 is planned for May.
• The Dell PowerVault NX3100 is expected in April.

Links

• Dell Intelligent Data Management
• Dell Storage
• Dell|EMC Alliance
• Dell|EMC DD Series
• Dell Deduplication
• Dell PowerVault DL2100 Powered by Symantec Backup Exec 2010
• Dell PowerVault DL2100 Powered by CommVault

About Dell

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¹IDC White Paper sponsored by EMC, As the Economy Contracts, the Digital Universe Expands, May 2009

²Measurement and Analysis of Large-Scale Network File System Workloads, University of California-Santa Cruz, USENIX Technical Conference, 2008

³Controlling Storage Costs Amid High Growth, Forrester Research, Inc., February, 2010

⁴ESG Research Report, 2010 IT Spending Intentions Survey, Bill Lundell, Jennifer Gahm and John McKnight, January, 2010

⁵ Based on a 20:1 deduplication ratio, Two Year Analysis Window, GFS Tape Rotation Scheme, initial data protection data starts at 500GB and grows to 1620GB over two years. Testing conducted by Principled Technologies sponsored by Symantec Corporation. Actual results will vary with data type, change rates, retention period and back-up methodologies.