Networking vendor Dell today shared the main features of Storage Center Operating System 7 that assists enterprises to shift to flash-based architectures.
Dell Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7) promotes the adoption of flash, elevates and abstracts data control through increased virtualization, and unifies Dell’s storage ecosystem across multiple portfolios.
Dell will deliver SCOS 7 as a free firmware upgrade for SC Series customers with a current support contract. Most SCOS 7 features are available immediately on SC9000, with general availability across the SC Series portfolio planned for Q3, 2016.
“SCOS 7 is Dell’s most forward-looking array software yet. Its smart features are designed to make data centers flexible and cost-efficient. Dell’s SC Series has become a powerful IT strategy that provides low TCO and high ROI,” said Alan Atkinson, GM—Dell | Storage , in a blog post.
SCOS 7 features
# Helps lower acquisition costs across flash and hybrid arrays
# Helps lower lifecycle costs through elevated, simplified management
# Increased flexibility to respond to business and technology changes
# Enhanced support for virtualization and cloud strategies
# Increased portfolio-level investment protection
Dell’s SC Series offers all-flash tiers under $0.45/GB, and hard drive tiers under $0.10/GB net effective capacity.
SCOS 7 helps customers store more data on fewer drives. Intelligent Deduplication and enhanced Intelligent Block-Level Compression can provide up to 10:1 capacity savings, reducing the cost of both flash and disk tiers.
SCOS 7 data reduction is integrated with the SC Series’ platform efficiency features, including auto-tiering. Deduplication and compression are each applied automatically and dynamically to optimize performance and cost savings throughout the data lifecycle.
SCOS 7 elevates the storage management control. With Dell’s new Live Migrate feature, multi-array federation becomes a standard capability for SC9000, SC8000 and SC4020 arrays. Storage administrators can move volumes quickly between arrays, optimizing and re-balancing the environment without interrupting workloads and without purchasing additional virtualization hardware or software.
In addition, SCOS 7 offers more granular management targeting and control.
“We’ve looked at various solutions from many of the flash storage vendors listed in Gartner’s Solid State Array Magic Quadrant. We found the deduplication and thin provisioning features of the Dell Storage SCOS 7 to offer the best efficiency and performance. On top of that, it’s easier to use,” said Samuel Nadeau, IT director, Infrastructure and Cloud Services, SherWeb
