By EMEKA AGINAM

Effort to overcome cost barriers that have hampered broad adoption of enterprise flash storage arrays has started yielding the expected results as Dell has removed price barriers for enterprise flash adoption. Accordingly, the the global availability of new enterprise class Dell Storage all-flash array (AFA) configurations has been tagged at the relative price of $25,000. With this development, Dell offers customers the lowest entry price for an all-flash mid-range solution by any major vendor.

“For years, price has been the number one barrier to enterprise flash adoption, and we are knocking down these walls to make the high performance, reliability and smaller footprint of flash practical for almost any workload,” Robin Kuepers, storage Marketing Director, Dell Europe, Middle East and Africa, (EMEA), said, adding that, “As Dell continues to bring down the cost of enterprise class storage, we now offer customers the industry’s easiest to use and lowest cost entry point into mid-range, all-flash enterprise arrays.”

This is even as customers continue to recognize Dell’s flash leadership, with the company being selected as the top choice for deploying enterprise flash/SSDs for the second consecutive year, according to an October 2014 SSG-NOW independent survey of more than 300 global IT leaders.

“Dell’s ability to disrupt the storage industry with its extremely attractive and low entry price for its all-flash storage offerings is made all the more impressive by its inclusion of enterprise-class features and functionality,” Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said.

According to him, “Given the overall value proposition—which is bolstered by Dell’s renowned Copilot support-it users around the globe should certainly give consideration to Dell when looking for AFA solutions”.

For Carmen Andreoli, Director of infrastructure and IT at ELEAD1ONE, a leading provider of web-based automotive dealership software, “We were interested in the Dell Storage SC Series, and decided to start in our corporate office and call centre with the SC4020 Flash-Optimised Solution that auto-tiers among write-intensive SSDs, read-intensive SSDs, and 7.2K HDD,”

“We stood-up the SC4020 in less than a day and then completed an entire online migration of our virtualized environment without any downtime in less than 24 hours. The SC4020 has exceeded our expectations – in both excellent performance and overall ease of use.

Dell’s Data Progression software lets the array do what it needs to do to optimise drives for performance and cost, and frees up hours of our time every month.”

Andreoli informed that both new AFA configurations are based on the Dell Storage SC4020 array, which includes 24 drive bays and dual controllers in a 2U chassis, plus all standard software, options, installation and three-years of Dell Copilot support.

Customers, Andreoli added may continue to expand their Dell Storage SC4020 AFA as an all-flash solution by adding additional read-intensive or write-intense drives or achieve additional cost savings at any time by automatically moving cold data to one or more optional tiers of traditional spinning disks.

The new Dell Storage SC4020 AFA configurations, according to Dell offer an economical starting point for all-flash performance to support a wide range of applications and workloads. Dell is now shipping two options:

The Dell Storage SC4020 Entry-Level AFA single-tier configuration includes six 480GB read-intensive SSDs for a total of 2.8 terabytes of raw capacity for an advertised street price of $25,000 The Dell Storage SC4020 Flash-Optimized AFA multi-tier configuration provides even faster write performance, while continuing to optimize cost.