14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, Dell, one of the leading manufacturers of servers and consumer computer systems, announced a new product, part of the company's EqualLogic lineup. Designed to deliver an increased level of scalability, the new PS5500E is meant to provide business customers worldwide with an impressive pack of features, specific to the company's entire EqualLogic PS Series. In addition, Dell also announced a series of advanced software features, including EqualLogic Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware, designed to improve data protection for virtual server environments.
“We’re seeing tremendous response from customers worldwide for the all-inclusive, enterprise-class software features that the Dell EqualLogic PS Series delivers. It’s a clear choice for those seeking a full-featured, intelligent, easy-to-manage storage solution,” said Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager of Dell Enterprise Storage. “Last quarter, our EqualLogic product line was the fastest-growing part of our storage portfolio, and helped make Dell the number one iSCSI storage provider in the world.”
The PS5500E is built on Dell's EqualLogic family, and is capable of delivering 24 to 48 terabytes of raw capacity in a 4U array, double the density and triple the capacity of its predecessor, the PS5000E model. Using the new PS5500E, an EqualLogic SAN can scale up to a whopping 576TB under a single management interface. In addition, the new array can now be combined in the same SAN group with the other EqualLogic systems, which makes it an ideal upgrading tool for business users.
The Round Rock, Texas-based company has also announced a series of enhancements across its EqualLogic product lineup. Dell’s highest performance SAN, the PS5000XV, now delivers 50% more capacity, using 450GB 15,000 rpm Serial Attached SCSI disk drives, which will be available in October 2008. A new RAID configuration feature, that will become available in January 2009, is support for RAID 6. Also, users will now benefit from direct integration of Citrix XenServer.