DELL Enterprise Solutions: Marking Territory

If Sri Lanka hopes to become and IT hub, its IT champions are going to need some serious hardware -- at-least that's what Dell seems to bet. The company's South Asian general manager of enterprise solutions, Sumir Bhatia recently unveiled the SC4000 mid-range fibre channel storage systems in Sri Lanka. Admittedly, storage isn't a typical "hot" tech topic. And I realised just how much of an esoteric subject this is when even after a full 10 minutes (high by typical journalistic standards) of searching on Google, I couldn't find any useful material.

Nevertheless, Dell's announcement is important primarily because it is cheaper and more flexible than its competition. The SC4000 series will debut with the SC4020, featuring 24 drive slots in a 2U (3.5 inch) rack, based on Dell Compellent Storage Centre Software. A full-sized SC4020 will have 120 slots, each of which can be used for SSDs or HDDs. Its maximum capacity will be 400TB. Now this is less than the SC8000 series, which was introduced two years ago, and starts with a 6U configuration and ultimately hold 2PB of data. Yet, both systems are designed to provide a cost-efficient solution for general enterprise applications.

Even if the SC4000 is fully configured as an all-flash system, it will cost 76% less than competing solutions. The SC4000 brings most of the features of the S8000 series to smaller storage requirements. This also means Dell is finally taking aim at a mid-range market for arrays priced between USD 25,000 and USD 50,000. The SC4000 will carry a starting list price below USD 40,000.

Customers can also use a hybrid configuration of SSD and HDD systems (HDD for data that is accessed rarely and SSD for information that is accessed frequently). Dell's systems will automatically allocate different types of data to different storage systems (HDD or SSD).

Dell, for its part, has its sights set on the mid-size deployments, especially in the rapidly expanding Asian region. In addition to the hardware, Dell will provide a full suite of Dell's application solutions. An important element of this is perpetual software licencing, which enables customers to pay once for software features, even across upgrades.

In a broader sense, Dell's interest also reflects the growing clout of IT in Sri Lanka. While not exactly home to an Asian Silicone Valley, the local IT industry has produced some notable heavyweights. So, for Dell this gamble maybe no gamble at all.

By Navam Niles