Dell has announced a number of new additions to its storage portfolio, but has emphasised its focus on VMware technologies.
The announcements are set to ramp up the "Dell Fluid Data solutions" strategy, in which it aims to make virtualised datacentres more manageable for businesses.
On the hardware side comes improvements to the EqualLogic PS ranges, with the launch of the PS4100 and PS6100 Series arrays. The new products, which Dell says are optimised for virtualised environments, bring in 2.5in drives for higher storage capacity and make the bold claim of a 60 per cent performance boost.
Our joint engineering efforts to integrate Dell storage solutions with the VMware platform continue to help customers grow their environments, meet business needs and more efficiently manage business requirements without adding complexity or cost.
The PS4100 series is aimed at the small to medium-sized business (SMB) with the SAN scaling to 36TB in one solo array. The PS6100 is for the next level up, allowing mid-sized business 72TB of storage, which Dell said allows the same performance with half the number of previous generation arrays.
In addition, it also announced a new NAS device, the EqualLogic FS7500, which works with the new PS ranges and Dell's Scalable File System to provide cache monitoring, load balancing and multi-threading within a mid-size environment.
Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager of Dell's enterprise storage division, said: "The new storage arrays and virtualisation tools can help our customers run highly optimised and efficient datacentres by automating configuration and improving performance without forcing forklift upgrades."
However, it was the software partnership Dell was keen to push, moving closer to virtualisation leader VMware.
The two firms have worked together to prepare for the upcoming VMware vSphere 5 rollout and Dell announced a number of new features in its ranges to help with integration.
For the EqualLogic range, Dell is brining in host integration tools for VMware 3.1 to boost the management and visibility within its storage.
Dell Compellent is introducing a replication adaptor to tie in with VMware's vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5, bringing in automatic failback in the event of a disaster, as well as additional tools to handle planned migrations and downtime.
Finally, for PowerVault, Dell has announced a new capability to manage numerous storage arrays from a single VMware vCenter Server instance.
"VMware and Dell have proven time and time again that the integration of storage infrastructures and virtual environments can have a dramatic impact on a customer's ability to increase flexibility while streamlining IT management," said Narayan Venkat, vice president of storage product management at VMware.
"Our joint engineering efforts to integrate Dell storage solutions with the VMware platform continue to help customers grow their environments, meet business needs and more efficiently manage business requirements without adding complexity or cost."
The hardware products are available to buy immediately. However, the software options will only begin rolling out in the third quarter of this year.
