Do you have PowerVault, EqualLogic, or Compellent customers who also need file storage? There’s a good chance that your SAN customers are facing growing demands for increased file storage capacity and you can provide it with Dell Unified Storage products.
Each of the Dell storage platforms – PowerVault, EqualLogic, and Compellent – offers a file storage appliance that allows your customers to add their file data onto their storage area network. This means all the benefits of easy management, easy scalability, and automatic data tiering are now available for your customers’ file data – all with a fully unified management experience.
The PowerVault NX3600, EqualLogic FS7600, and Compellent FS8600 are purpose-built NAS appliances that provide reliability and performance, connectivity for 1G, 10G, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel, and an internal cluster interconnect. The real value of the new NAS products is in Dell’s FluidFS – a file system for future generations. FluidFS is NAS software originally developed by the scale-out storage innovator Exanet and acquired by Dell in 2010. FluidFS is a file system for future generations.
Jennifer Myers describes the benefits of FluidFS for Unified Storage this way:
No Namespace or Scalability Limits
Architecturally there are no practical limits on FluidFS scalability. This means the capacity limits are only a function of the underlying SAN capacity. Today, (some competitors’) products have strict limits on capacity (256TB per NAS controller), volume size (16TB) and file size. On the other hand, FluidFS today can put the entire capacity of the underlying SAN in a single pool, a single volume, and even in a single directory (if the user so chooses). Although not everyone has a Petabyte of files, without name-space restrictions, Sysadmin have one less thing to work around.
Scaling on-demand
A core tenet of Dell’s Fluid Data Architecture is peer scaling; the ability to grow easily and transparently as the customers’ workload demands increase. FluidFS can provide performance scaling by adding controllers to the cluster, and customers can grow capacity by adding SAN arrays. The advanced clustering model of FluidFS allows for namespace ownership to be allocated across cluster members without the need for central metadata or “housekeeping” server. But these mechanics are transparent to the clients because FluidFS provides a single virtual IP address (VIP) and provides native load balancing for distribution of client requests across the cluster. To-date, up to 8 controllers in a cluster have been certified, which, when outfitted with 10G LAN uplinks, can stream data at near-HPC rates.
High Performance to meet the needs of all workloads
Some legacy users of the Exanet ExaStore system have stated that this file system is the fastest NAS solution they have ever tested. Although it is not an immediate goal to go put 1000 SSDs in a cluster and shoot for 1 million SpecSFS IOPS, that strength was inherited by FluidFS.
Start calling on your SAN customers today and help them benefit from the scalability and ease of use of Dell’s Unified Storage offering.
Learn More on PartnerDirect Portal! And get Partner AdvantEdge points for doing it!
Through April 2013, you can benefit from taking training on Dell’s Unified storage products.
| Sales Training promotion |
The first 250 Partners to complete four NAS sales training classes will earn 350 Partner AdvantEdge points!
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| Technical Training promotion |
The first 250 Partners to complete four NAS technical training classes will earn 350 Partner AdvantEdge points!
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