As a result of acquisitions, Dell's storage portfolio includes products originating from Compellent (the SC series) and from EqualLogic (the PS series), as well as the Dell-native PowerVault range.
SCOS 7 plays an important part in bringing together the SC and PS series by providing unified management plus the ability to perform live migrations between them, Dell Australia director of storage and data management Andrew Diamond told iTWire.
The new Dell Storage Manager software — which requires SCOS 7 — handles FS storage as well as SC and PS. Another advantage over its predecessor (SC Series Enterprise Manager) is that it uses an HTML5-based interface, doing away with the need for Java, he said.
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Other management improvements delivered in SCOS 7 include quality of service features to ensure mission-critical applications get the resources they need, and support for VMware Vvols.
SCOS 7 also provides what Dell calls "the most comprehensive data reduction" scheme, using patented intelligent deduplication and enhanced intelligent block-level compression that can provide more than 10:1 capacity savings.
"Dell's been leading the way on flash pricing" said Diamond, and these new capabilities reduce all-flash costs to less that US$0.45 per gigabyte.
Deduplication and compression are available at no extra cost, and can be applied to individual volumes or volume groups, he added.
SCOS 7 will be a free firmware upgrade for SC series customers with a current support contract, with general availability expected in the third quarter of 2016.
PS series with a current support contract also qualify for a free upgrade to PS 9.0 firmware (available this month), which is required for the unified management and cross-platform replication capabilities. A replication licence is needed for the SC series array(s).
