Home Enterprise Dell EMC SC5020 Storage Array Announced

Dell EMC SC5020 Storage Array Announced

by Lyle Smith

Dell has announced the EMC SC5020, the latest offering in the economical, midrange SC Series. Unveiled during Dell EMC World 2017, the new SC5020 is the direct successor to the SC4020, a 24-bay storage array that marked a huge step forward for Dell Storage due to its ability to compete with other similar-performing systems at 1/10 the price point. The SC5020 is set out to do this and more, doubling down on Dell’s claim of “enabling modern technology advantages at the lowest cost.”


Dell has announced the EMC SC5020, the latest offering in the economical, midrange SC Series. Unveiled during Dell EMC World 2017, the new SC5020 is the direct successor to the SC4020, a 24-bay storage array that marked a huge step forward for Dell Storage due to its ability to compete with other similar-performing systems at 1/10 the price point. The SC5020 is set out to do this and more, doubling down on Dell’s claim of “enabling modern technology advantages at the lowest cost.”

The new SC5020 is a fully re-designed server array with up to 45% more IOPS, three times the bandwidth, quadruple the system memory, and double the maximum capacity (2PB) compared to the SC4020. Additionally, Dell has added deeper integration with Dell EMC ecosystem (e.g., PowerPath, RecoverPoint, and Data Domain), remote installation services option and simplified software licensing.

The SC5020 has moved from a 2U to a 3U form factor and is equipped with 30 internal drive slots, dual controllers, Fibre Channel and iSCSI network I/O. Dell has also added a new flash architecture, giving users the flexibility to set their own price/performance ratio, while giving customers the ability to scale and modify their options as their storage needs grow.

Customers will be able to take advantage of Dell’s Storage Center Operating System (SCOS), the next-generation operating system for SC Series arrays. Currently in version 7, SCOS is designed to make data centers flexible and cost-efficient so customers can create hybrid solutions that leverage the performance of SSDs with the cost-savings of less expensive 7200 rpm HDDs.  

Moreover, users will have the ability to track the independent activity of very granular sub-LUN data and freely move this data between SSDs, HDDs, and RAID levels. As all writes go to Tier 1 flash, Dell indicates their users will experience high performance on every workload. Data is also converted to more efficient RAID levels (and then moved to higher-capacity HDDs when data becomes designated as cold data), so customers won’t have to open their wallets as often to buy more SSDs. Customers can also easily add SSDs for speed–and HDDs for more capacity–at any time; freeing them from ever being stuck in a particular configuration.

Dell has also announced they will be adding the Dell EMC tools (RecoverPoint, PowerPath, VPLEX and ViPR) to the SC Series.

Availability

Customers can order the Dell EMC SC5020 this month, with general availability sometime in June.

Dell EMC SC Series Storage

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