Dell Compellent Storage Center validated with up to five nines of availability

  Posted on behalf of Bob Fine, Product Marketing Director, Dell Compellent

Enterprises are dealing with a data deluge. Dell Compellent and the Dell Fluid Data architecture provide customers with a fully integrated, intelligent approach to that challenge. Storage Center is architected to optimize the efficiency and performance of your data center, enabling you to store more data at the lowest possible cost. But all the optimization in the world won’t help you if your storage system goes down. Dell Compellent’s Storage Center is field-tested to provide up to five nines of availability (99.999%)**—making it an ideal enterprise storage solution. 

Dell Compellent provides the enterprise with a combination of hardware and software features—along with award-winning Copilot Support—that yields the highest system availability to enterprises that must operate 24/7.

Redundant hardware

Storage Center is built on a flexible, persistent hardware platform that supports continuous, online adoption of new technologies as your business grows. Upgrades like adding drives or updating firmware can be done without downtime. Even interface upgrades, for example from 4 Gb Fibre Channel to 8 Gb Fibre Channel, can be performed without downtime.  All major hardware components have redundant and hot-swappable components—such as power supplies and drives—resulting in no disruption to your business in the event of sub-component failure. A SMART (self-monitoring analysis and reporting technology) system helps ensure drive integrity, and dual controllers that can be placed in separate racks further reduce the risk of failure. Our ability to move data to the optimal RAID level means you can store more on less expensive tiers, providing maximum RAID protection for the lowest obtainable cost.

Integrated software

Tight integration between Dell Compellent hardware and its leading data protection software technologies further strengthen availability.  Software including Data Instant Replay, Remote Instant Replay and Live Volume work together to maximize recovery time objectives and provide business continuity even in the face of disaster. Space-efficient snapshots provide faster recovery on local disks while the dynamic data movement enabled by Live Volume reduces the recovery time associated with long-distance replication.

Disk virtualization protects your data even as you scale by spreading workload across multiple drives and thus reducing risk of a single drive going offline and impacting a critical volume.  For a final layer of security, remote replication can be set up in six clicks and can be configured between different Storage Center configurations for protection in the unlikely event a local system suffers a full failure. Meanwhile, Enterprise Manager provides visibility to this and other processes in the system, with easy to use performance monitoring through a single interface. 

Proactive support

From your drive to your desktop, industry-leading Copilot Support provides further peace of mind with proactive monitoring and support. Copilot’s “Phone Home” feature automatically reports on system parameters.  Through proactive monitoring of this data, potential trouble spots are anticipated before they become a problem area. That’s what it’s all about—maximizing availability, fixing things before they happen, and maximizing protection at the lowest possible cost.

Continuous data availability is critical to business success. Hardware, software and industry-leading support combine to provide reliable performance and economy and, with five nines of availability, Dell Compellent keeps your data ready to use when and where you need it.

For more information on our Dell Compellent Storage Center visit our product page here.

** Results based on January 2012 internal Dell testing with actual MTBF calculated from a run time total of 26 million+ hours.  Run time and availability impacting failures for a 6 month period from 8/2011 thru 1/2012. Estimated weighted average MTTR of 7.2 hours for 12 hour part SLA, 4.5 hours for 4 hour part SLA.

About the Author: Michelle Richard