This morning was the first customer facing keynote and we saw a number of announcements.
Darren Thomas VP and GM for Dell Storage presented on talking about Dell’s journey, key business values, goals and new product announcements.
For Dell Compellent we saw the announcement of Storage Center 6.3 offering boosts in performance up to 100% just through a software update! They also announced they would be the first array with 16Gb FC end to end support. These features come with a number of improvements and enhancements that have came since the first 64bit version of Storage Center 6.0 that was announced during the Storage Forum in London earlier in the year.
Bob Fine expanded on the announcement during the press and bloggers session going on to explain how the updates would be available for free to customers with existing support, without having downtime or rip and replace. How many other vendors are able to offer these kind of enhancements within the same units with just a software update?
The Compellent solution is expanding and growing into Dells greater fluid vision with the FS8600 NAS. One of my key goals for the next 12 months is to come a lot more familiar with Compellent. To be it sounds a really exciting technology and I look forward to learning more about 6.3.
For the MD and Data Protection lines we saw version 3 of the firmware introduced offering iSCSI based replication, thin provisioning, VMware VAAI support and SSD based caching. With all these features within the MD range it is making it much more than a my first SAN solution offering many of the key features and more of its competing products and even able to start punching against its weight at a cheaper price point.
We also saw a wealth of releases from the data proaction product line with the AppAssure DL4000 backup appliance, the CommVault DL2300 and Quest NetVault Backup 9.0. I am a little confused as it stands where the place is within Dell for so many backup products. We will see how that matures and the different divisions start working together. Certainly from what I have seen from the user interface of the Quest NetVault Backup 9.0 product looks very nice and easy to use but I am looking forward to seeing what the future brings.
There weren’t any announcements regarding the EqualLogic range but Pete Korce talked about the intention of looking at how EqualLogic could be utilised within the host with JBODs. For me this is really excited particularly for VDI workloads utilising SSDs or for branch offices. I look forward to learning more about this throughout the conference and as it is further developed.
I am looking forward to attending the rest of the conference now, sitting some hands on labs and learning about some of the new technologies and announcements.
Virtualised Reality 