New Dell SAN ships virtualisation-ready

Dell has bundled snapshot, replication and hypervisor integration features into a new SAN, the EqualLogic PS4000. The new device is ready to support applications virtualised under vSphere, Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer.

Dell Australia’s Justin Boyd, the company’s ANZ Enterprise Marketing manager, said he expects the new SAN will continue to win customers from large corporates looking to adopt larger numbers of smaller SANs.

“We have some very, very large customers who have been burned by the operating costs of larger SANs,” he says. Rather than rely on a single SAN to support multiple applications, he says such organisations are instead acquiring small SANs like Dell’s EqualLogic line to support a single application. This arrangement, he said, is proving more cost-effective and easier to manage.

Smaller businesses may find the company’s new Windows Storage Server appliance to their liking. The new PowerVault NX3000 is a rack-mounted device based on Dell’s new server range. The device has just four drives of its own, but can control other storage devices (even the PS4000, which it treats as an iSCSI target) to increase capacity. The machine includes bundled single-instance storage to help users control data proliferation.

“Small business just loves the appliance story,” Boyd told SearchStorage ANZ.

Local pricing for both devices is yet to be announced, but Dell hinted that the PS4000 will start at around $4,000.