Every year “InfoWorld Technology of the Year” awards recognize the most groundbreaking and valuable products in IT. Dell EqualLogic products have now won this award two years in a row.
InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers selected Dell EqualLogic PS6010XVS iSCSI SAN as the Best Storage System in InfoWorld’s 2011 Technology of the Year awards.
Why is this product ground breaking and valuable:
In most workloads, for example database applications, and virtual desktop implementations, a relatively small portion of storage capacity gets accessed very heavily. These “hot” areas of storage are either difficult to segregate or they change over time (or both!). Choosing high-performance storage for the entire workload is not cost effective and selecting capacity-oriented storage for the entire workload provides sub-optimal performance. Moreover, manual tiering of storage in a multi-tiered workload is either cost prohibitive or becomes ineffective over time.
EqualLogic PS6010XVS “hybrid” SANs are designed to address this problem.
With 16 drives – eight high performance SSD drives and eight high capacity 15K rpm SAS hard disk drives – EqualLogic XVS SANs are designed from ground up to support fast access to high demand “hot” data in a multi-tiered workload. The on-board intelligence of the EqualLogic firmware provides automatic tiering between the two drive types – SSD and SAS, as well as automatic load balancing across multiple drives of each type, helping deliver the appropriate balance of performance and capacity for multi-tiered workloads.
What makes it compelling:
InfoWorld’s hands-on review revealed the simplicity of EqualLogic PS6010XVS “hybrid” SAN design and effectiveness of its unique automatic tiering. In fact, PS6010XVS so much “sizzled” in Paul Venezia’s testing that it received an “Excellent” rating with a score of 9.2 out of 10.