Driving applications and workload performance to new heights

Dell is enabling customers to redraw the boundaries of IT with new enterprise solutions designed to dramatically speed application response times, strengthen the ties among data centre technologies and simplify IT operations.

CIOs are being tasked to enable their businesses to move faster without infrastructure downtime. This includes accelerating application performance and response times and providing high availability to the business – all while often being budget constrained. The new and enhanced Dell solutions help customers make the most of their IT investments by cutting through the silos to improve application performance and make it easier to manage data centre operations.

“IT leaders are facing the challenge of balancing costs with the need to provide bleeding-edge IT services to ensure businesses do not risk losing customers, revenue or productivity. The fact of the matter is handling an increased traffic of any kind puts strain on a data centre – and many solutions in the market only address parts of the problem,” said Marius Haas, chief commercial officer and president, Enterprise Solutions, Dell. “By leveraging organic and inorganic intellectual property, Dell is accelerating the delivery of its enterprise vision and providing businesses with a unique application acceleration solution that helps increase agility and be more responsive to their customers.”

Dell Accelerates Application Performance by Speeding Most Frequently Used Data
Dell Fluid Cache for SAN brings data closer to the server while improving application performance and reducing response times. Helping address performance issues that customers face with applications requiring fast access to data, such as online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and cloud, this technology helps organisations speed up access to data by pooling and utilising Dell PCI Express Flash drives for low-latency data caching inside traditional servers.

Dell Fluid Cache for SAN has achieved 5 million random read input/output per second (IOPS) and can reduce cost per user by up to 71 percent. Dell lab tests also revealed improved database average response times capable of 99 percent while allowing a more than six-fold increase in the number of concurrent users – increasing from just 2200 to 14000 users.

By providing a single infrastructure for data at both high and low ends of the performance spectrum, Dell Fluid Cache for SAN eliminates the tradeoffs between server performance and full-featured SAN benefits such as reliability, manageability and data protection. Intelligent data placement from the server to SAN can enable customers to significantly improve performance while reducing solution costs by enabling the right data to reside at the right place at the right time. A single management interface and fully integrated SAN capabilities, including automated tiering, cache-aware snapshots, replication and compression, also helps customers save time and resources with the advantages of excellent application performance and Dell’s advanced storage economics.

Bringing the most frequently accessed data closer to compute resources minimises data travel from storage to the server and enables customers to:
· Improve performance: Deliver critical results faster, boost transactional performance and reduce response times by leveraging the end-to-end capabilities of Dell PowerEdge servers with Dell Express Flash PCIe SSDs, Dell Networking 10/40GbE switches and Dell Compellent Data Progression intelligent tiering technology.
· Ensure data integrity: Maintain confidence that the cache pool data is highly available and safeguarded by write-back caching technology, with no single point of failure from server to SAN.
· Enhance flexibility: Enable database and virtualization performance scalability on demand with a SAN-based solution that allows for the addition of drives and nodes to be added to an active cache pool as needed, allowing business to grow as demand dictates.
· Maximise storage investment: Extend the power of Dell intelligent data placement from the SAN to the server, allowing data to be managed holistically and reside on optimal drive types based on actual performance needs to lower overall total storage costs.

New Dell Compellent Storage Center Software Release Offers Enhanced Performance, Security and Management
In addition to enabling Flash optimization and the intelligent placement of data between the onboard server cache and traditional storage arrays, new Dell Compellent Storage Center 6.5 array software extends the performance and tiering advancements of previous Storage Center releases while offering new enterprise features for customers.

The Dell Compellent Flash-optimized Solution with Storage Center continues to be the first storage solution in its class with intelligent data placement across multiple types of flash technologies or in combination with traditional disk drives. As Dell continues to redefine the economics of enterprise storage, this helps customers optimise performance across various drive types for a lower total storage environment cost. With Dell’s Data Progression technology, customers also can achieve all flash performance for the price of 15K drive technology while reducing their storage footprint.

Relieving customers from the historical tradeoff between low cost capacity and high performance, Storage Center 6.5 supports the ability to achieve, in one SAN, both impressive flash performance and super dense, low cost capacity storage that is enhanced with new block level compression. Additional new Storage Center 6.5 benefits and enterprise features include:
· Increased efficiency – with the introduction of block level compression technology for allowing SAN customers to store more data with fewer disk drives with a compression ratio of up to 77 percent(5).
· Enhanced security – with the introduction of self-encrypting drives (SEDs), which offer a highly secure solution for organisations pursuing data privacy or maintaining regulatory compliance requirements, such as those in finance, legal and healthcare industries.
· Enhanced business continuity – with new synchronous Live Volume capability, customers can restore data non-disruptively, keeping applications running during unplanned outages without the need to remap server configurations.
· Improved cloud environment support – with multi-VLAN tagging support that lets service providers offer multiple service levels to customers on different secure virtual domains on the same Storage Center.

Systems Management Becomes Simpler
Dell has enhanced its systems management portfolio with new features that automate IT operations and improve efficiency, availability and reliability. The latest release of the Dell OpenManage portfolio includes:
· Dell OpenManage Essentials 1.3: Designed for monitoring enterprise-class hardware, this systems management console now adds data centre protection through integration with Dell AppAssure for scheduled system backups of server data, operating systems, applications, files and databases, as well as discovery and monitoring of Dell SonicWALL security appliances.
· Dell OpenManage Mobile: Integrated with OpenManage Essentials 1.3, and available to customers as a free software download, this is the industry’s first mobile handheld solution to provide IT administrators one-to-many access to anywhere, anytime data centre monitoring of servers, storage, networking and firewall systems.
· iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller: With new automatic deployment and configuration functionality, administrators can reduce the number of steps required to deploy hardware configurations by up to 97 percent, as compared to capturing and deploying the configurations manually.

Dell also has enhanced its full suite of Dell EqualLogic Host Integration Tools software that enables efficient data protection and simplifies management of Dell EqualLogic storage arrays through tight integration with VMware, Microsoft and Linux server virtualization platforms and applications. The new generation of EqualLogic software, available for the new EqualLogic PS6210 Series and other PS Series arrays, offers improved and simplified SAN performance, streamlined management, and improved administrator efficiency to provide customers with a storage environment finely tuned for virtual computing environments.

Making the Network Connection: Advancing Data Centre Fabrics and Control for SDN, NFV and Cloud Solutions
Dell also showcased new networking solutions to help customers deliver faster results, maximise efficiency and modernise and transform operations in scale-out and cloud-based environments. New products introduced include:
· Dell Networking Z9500 Ethernet fabric switch – the densest, highest performing fixed-form factor switch for scale-out data centre and cloud workload designs.
· Dell Active Fabric Controller - purpose-built software for zero-touch provisioning and orchestration of virtualized networking functions and services.
· Dell NFV efforts – takes leadership role in industry consortium and joins with industry partners to accelerate NFV adoption.