“The Compellent FS8600 has proven to be a scalable and redundant file storage solution with simple management and excellent performance. Support is also very important to us, and our experience with Copilot has been very satisfactory.” – Niklas Jacobson, Co-founder, Important Looking Pirates
Dell has accrued more than a decade of experience helping customers deploy network-attached Storage (NAS) systems to deal with the proliferation of user files and rapidly growing file workloads in a broad range of industries. In doing so, we realized these customers were most often frustrated with scalability limitations and management inefficiencies. So we started building a new class of NAS solutions from the ground up to address their concerns. Since then, we’ve made tremendous strides in supporting our customers with high performance, highly scalable file storage systems.
In 2010, the Dell Storage team evaluated a variety of technologies and acquired the assets of Exanet which developed a clustered NAS system that provided scalable performance and unlimited capacity for a wide range of file applications. Soon afterwards, we introduced the first generation of scale-out file storage solutions with Dell Fluid File System (FluidFS v1). Early on we understood the vast scalability and performance capabilities inherent in the Fluid File System (FluidFS) architecture.
Fast forward to 2013 – the momentum has been building for three years. Dell has become a mainstream NAS vendor, and we’re winning deals against Isilon and NetApp. We are excited to announce the availability of the Compellent FS8600 and FluidFS v3 with increased scalability and performance innovations. The Compellent FS8600 and FluidFS architecture now supports a single namespace up to 2PB and delivers linear performance expansion up to 494K SPECsfs file OPS. The solution offers customers configuration flexibility, industry-low cost per OPS and the best rack density available from major NAS vendors. The FS8600 is also the industry’s first primary storage solution with all-inclusive software licensing and policy-driven variable block data reduction, which can decrease the storage capacity needed for common enterprise data by 48 percent.
Our customers and partners are extremely enthusiastic about the FluidFS v3 solution. Their reactions have been overwhelming positive.
“FluidFS v3 is an impressive release – in one step Dell has increased the space available in a single name space to 2PB, integrated advanced deduplication and compression, and achieved substantial performance increases.” – Michael Tanenhaus, Principal, Mavenspire (channel partner)
FluidFS v3 is an impressive release – in one step Dell has increased the space available in a single name space to 2PB, integrated advanced deduplication and compression, and achieved substantial performance increases.
“With the FS8600 v3 code, we will be able to utilize thin volume cloning and de-dupe, and will be ready to take advantage of the advanced compression algorithms coming in a future version of FluidFS. This will help reduce our disk costs and provide ongoing value to the enterprise.” – Rick Abendroth, Systems Engineer, Associated Bank (FluidFS v3 beta customer)
Our commitment and development efforts will continue to ramp up as more and more customers adopt our NAS solutions to successfully address their most challenging file storage needs. But we are not stopping there. In addition to the availability of our NAS solutions, we are also excited to announce the availability of the Dell Networking S6000 series switches.
The Dell Networking S Series S6000 is the latest addition to Dell’s rapidly growing networking portfolio – a part of Dell’s business which has just seen 10 consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth. The S6000 is the industry’s highest-density 1U 10/40GbE switching platform for highly-virtualized data centers. A fixed form factor design, the S6000 doubles the density and throughput while consuming up to 50 percent less power than previous generation’s top-of-rack switches. Built-in advanced virtualization and automation features help customers scale larger virtual deployments in a smaller physical footprint, and helps solve the challenge of bridging virtualized and non-virtualized aspects of the infrastructure.
We are expanding the range and capabilities of our file storage systems and our networking solutions. The availability of the FS8600 and S6000 reflects our continued commitment to bringing customers easily managed, high performance enterprise technology at a cost-effective price. So stay tuned, more innovations are coming.