Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) today expanded its OEM relationship with long-time partner EMC (NYSE: EMC) and unveiled a new object-based storage system.
Despite Dell’s evolution over the last two years from an EMC partner into a major player in the storage networking market, the company’s relationship with data storage giant EMC appears to remain intact.
Today, Dell announced plans to resell EMC Data Domain deduplication systems, as was widely expected, and Dell will also expand its agreement with EMC to resell Celerra unified storage arrays.
The new Dell-EMC DD Series will include the EMC Data Domain DD140, DD610 and DD630 dedupe appliances. On the unified storage front, in addition to the Celerra NX4 already rebranded as the Dell NX4, Dell will also resell the NS-120, NS-480 and NS-960 under the Dell-EMC NS Series.
Dell also announced improvements to its PowerVault DL2100 disk backup system, powered by software from Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) and CommVault (NASDAQ: CVLT), and the company also unveiled the PowerVault NX3100, a network-attached storage (NAS) solution that can handle both block and file storage. The PowerVault NX3100 is built for capacity, with up to 24TB internally and up to 384TB externally.
Dell’s Object Storage System
Dell senior product manager Brett Roscoe said the object storage system is “Dell developed and branded,” a year or more under development, but an industry source said CAS vendor Caringo also played a role in the system’s development.
The Dell DX Object Storage Solution uses metadata to identify a file and then stores fixed content to a global namespace. Roscoe said the system “scales limitlessly,” to 2 petabytes or more.
The commodity storage system is about “half the cost of a typical SAN,” said Roscoe, and is self-healing, uses wizard-based setup and does not require LUNs or RAID groups.
Dell is working with a number of independent software vendors (ISVs) to develop solutions around the platform and is offering a solution development kit (SDK) for its partners, which include Acuo, Bridgehead Software, CommVault, EMC, Iron Mountain, Karos Health, Moonwalk, OpenText, Stealth Software, StoredIQ, Symantec and Teramedica.
The first DX Object Storage solutions will be for healthcare, file and email archiving, eDiscovery and content management.
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