Home Enterprise Dell Adopts New Flash Technology Driving Down Adoption Price

Dell Adopts New Flash Technology Driving Down Adoption Price

by Adam Armstrong

Today Dell Inc. announced that it was the first storage array provider to adopt the industry’s newest, highest-density and lowest-cost for performance enterprise flash drives. The adopting of this technology will dramatically drive down price per GB while improving performance as customers can switch to SSDs from HDDs. Dell states it can offer all-flash mid-tier solutions for as low as $1.66/GB before data reduction is applied.


Today Dell Inc. announced that it was the first storage array provider to adopt the industry’s newest, highest-density and lowest-cost for performance enterprise flash drives. The adopting of this technology will dramatically drive down price per GB while improving performance as customers can switch to SSDs from HDDs. Dell states it can offer all-flash mid-tier solutions for as low as $1.66/GB before data reduction is applied.

The new SSD are read intensive, based off of Triple Level Cell (TLC) 3D NAND technology, and run in capacities up to 3.8TB. Once combined with Dell’s intelligent data placement technology and ran on Dell’s SC series, customers will be able to benefit from low price-for-performance and a big bump in overall capacity. Dell’s intelligent data placement technology also enables different types of flash technology (SLC, MLC and TLC) to be deployed in multi-tier architectures. Dell is the first vendor to support this new technology.

Earlier this year Dell released an all-flash version of their SC4020 for under $25,000. This in and of itself made an attractive option for companies to move to all-flash. And according to Dell several companies have taking advantage of this, as their SC Series revenue grew 89% year over year in the first quarter of 2015. With the ability to integrate the new flash technology, Dell knocks another chunk out of the price barrier that is holding companies back from embrace all-flash arrays.

The combination of Dell’s intelligent data placement technology and the read-intensive TCL 3D NAND SSDs will give users 24 times the performance of 15K HDDs at roughly the same price. Not only that they will have 6 times the density, lower latency, and lower power consumption of 15K HDDs. A 2U SC4020 will now have a maximum capacity of 90TB and a SC8000 will be able to support up to 3PB of flash in a single array.

With the new drive technology Dell can offer customers different configurations for their given needs. Customers can even have different types of flash tiers for their data or if they choose to go with a more cost-effective path, they could use the new flash technology for the first tier and have their less accessed tier be comprised of 7200 RPM HDDs.

Availability

Dell’s SC Series is available now and the support of the new SSDs based on TLC 3D NAND technology is expected to be available in August 2015.

Dell SC Series

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