Dell unveils storage update alongside EMC

Dell continued its onslaught of product announcements today with a list of new storage options.

During its annual strategy and product launch in San Francisco, the company unveiled three new offerings with a heavy emphasis on its partnership with EMC.

The first is the Dell DX Object Storage Platform, built on top of a standard Dell server and based on x86 architecture. The key points of the release are the self managing and automation aspects, making it both easy to use and scalable.

"This system, no matter how big it gets, you will be able to sort in under a second, normally in milliseconds," said Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager of storage and networking at Dell.

"Its got enormous capability, better than anything out there today... but the device it sits on is just an inexpensive Dell server."

The system, fully stacked with SATA drives, will be available from May and a software development kit (SDK) will also be launched for users to develop their own applications.

The next product uses takes advantage of EMC's Data Domain acquisition.

Dell will now be offering the DD140, DD160 and DD630 under the Dell/EMC partnership as part of its portfolio, bringing it to a wider audience than it may have reached before.

The company also confirmed a new direction with EMC, getting on board with its unified storage systems.

Brett Rosco, senior product manager of Dell Enterprise Storage, said: "The unified piece, it is really about networked storage... whether it's FCoE, ISCSI or Fibre Channel."

The NS series is designed for bringing together all different types of storage connections to one box. It has proved successful so far for EMC but now has the added weight of the Dell brand on its box.

Finally, Dell also confirmed some of its more basic backup to disk solutions had been updated, featuring suites from Symantec and CommVault.