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Dell muscles into all-flash for small biz with $35k 4TB array

Claims it's cheaper than rivals, natch...

Dell is shipping a go-faster version of its $25k entry-level all-flash array for $35k.

The basic SC4020 AFA single-tier configuration has six 480GB read-intensive SSDs, 2.8TB raw capacity, for an advertised street price of $25,000, $8.83/raw GB.

A flash-optimised multi-tier config has faster write performance. It has six 200GB write-intensive SSDs (SLC we understand) added to the six read-intensive (MLC) ones. That’s 4TB of raw capacity with a street price of $35,000.

Dell claims customers have an up to 5x price advantage over competing all-flash solutions.

The SC4020 array has a 24-drive bay 2U chassis with dual controllers, installation, and three years of Dell’s Copilot support. The unused bays can be filled with additional SSDs and customers can add tiers of spinning disk to create a hybrid array.

Dell says all incoming writes and “hot reads” are handled by the fastest SSD tier, to get maximum application performance. The Storage Center 6.5 firmware takes care of this and provides Data Progression (tiering) thin provisioning, and space-efficient snapshots.

Once again Dell claims customers pay less, with an up to 2x price advantage over competitive hybrid-flash products.

There is an ESG report available, comparing the SC4020’s total cost of ownership against other systems. While not identifying the two competing systems used, it asserts that the “Dell total cost of ownership is impressively lower over an eight-year period than its competitors".

All the cost components - acquisition, power and cooling, software and licensing, and support - appeared to be lower than the competing products.

This data should help Dell withstand competition from Tegile and other hybrid array vendors as well as help it better penetrate the small and medium business all-flash array market.

With Violin Memory expected to move down market that is timely.

We can suppose that, were deduplication to be added to the SC4020 operating system the effective cost/GB would be even lower. ®

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