EqualLogic gets NAS and DCB
For the first of the Dell announcements, FS 7500 provides a unique option for Dell EqualLogic customers, although I'm not sure if the customer needs a pure NAS solution, if the FS 7500 is the solution, at least not yet. The FS 7500 is a continuation of Dell's refinement of the file system it was after when it purchased Exanet a while back. The FS 7500 is today limited to four nodes and provides little additional data services other than the CIFS/NFS sharing and network I/O scaling. This strategy of limited data services makes sense given the EqualLogic and eventually a Compellent back end. Why reinvent something that is already there?
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
George Crump, Senior Analyst
Dell is a client of Storage Switzerland
A key component is that the management of the NAS is done through the EqualLogic management software. This provides a single plane of glass to manage those data services even though the NAS itself is on different nodes.
Storage Swiss believes that the FS 7500 will do well for a current or future EqualLogic customer that needs to add file services to the array but where their primary needs can be served by iSCSI block. That said Dell needs to, and eventually will address, the larger NAS market by allowing more nodes per NAS cluster. When they do this it puts them squarely in the scale out NAS market but with at least one advantage, integrated data services, that their competitors simply can't support.
As part of this announcement Dell is also upgrading the EqualLogic firmware. Part is to support the FS 7500 but they are also adding support for Data Center Bridging (DCB). DCB allows for Ethernet to provide a lossless environment, which is critical for IP based storage environments like iSCSi. In fact Dell hinted that they are seeing a measurable performance gain in comparison to non DCB environments. To the best of our knowledge there is no one else with a iSCSI target that leverages DCB. Clearly there is a lot to dive into on this subject. Stay tuned for Storage Switzerland continued updates.
The final announcement was a fibre channel PowerVault product for environments that need a less feature ladened but fast FC based storage system. This can do well in some HPC environments and it could appeal to cloud providers looking to assemble their own storage system.
Dell is beginning to show a fair amount of conservatism when it comes to maturing their storage offering. While this can be frustrating at times to both users and analysts it is the right thing to do. Make sure it works, then take the next step in scaling the solution.
Dell Storage Forum Note
