Dell Makes Ground-Breaking Leap Forward with Uniquely Adaptable, Future-Ready Storage Solutions

•       Dell Storage Center Operating System 7 offers a revolutionary approach and economics for all-flash and hybrid flash arrays with deeper intelligence and industry-leading data efficiency

•       Dell delivers greater flexibility, virtualization and control with enhanced support for VMware, cloud and multi-tenancy environments

•       One Dell Storage ecosystem proves Dell’s commitment to common management, smooth transition path and investment protection for customers

Singapore– May 20, 2016 – Dell today announced Storage Center Operating System 7, the culmination of a three-year effort to redefine the economics of enterprise storage with an innovative platform which embraces and helps accelerate the industry shift to modern, flash-based architectures.

Dell Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7) aggressively promotes the adoption of flash, elevates and abstracts data control through increased virtualization, and unifies Dell’s storage ecosystem across multiple portfolios. The release provides new intelligence and flexibility to help businesses “flash-forward,” advancing their infrastructures to meet today’s needs and prepare for future challenges.  SCOS 7 delivers industry-leading capabilities resulting in significant business benefits for customers including:

“Dell’s SC Series has always been an extremely progressive storage platform – and SCOS 7 is by far our most revolutionary software release to date,” said Mak Chin Wah, general manager, Enterprise Solutions, South Asia, Dell. “We designed the SC platform from the ground up to be future ready and this release takes flash, deduplication and system intelligence to the next level.” 

Already the industry price leader on a cost-per-gigabit basis for effective flash capacity 1, Dell’s SC Series now offers all-flash tiers under $0.45/GB, and hard drive tiers under $0.10/GB net effective capacity.2 SCOS 7 makes leading-edge storage technology practical for more workloads, enabling a fundamental transformation of the data center by eliminating acquisition cost barriers for flash and lowering ongoing expense with simplified management and increased efficiency,

•       Increased data center flexibility – SCOS 7 elevates the storage management control, helping customers respond to changing requirements rapidly and with minimal disruption.  With Dell’s new Live Migrate feature, multi-array federation becomes a standard capability for SC9000, SC8000 and SC4020 arrays.  Storage administrators can now move volumes quickly and seamlessly 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. 

•       New Quality of Service features help administrators automatically allocate resources to match their unique business priorities, ensuring top performance for mission-critical apps even in contentious multi-workload environments.

•       VMware VVOLs support allows provisioning, monitoring and management of storage at a virtual machine level.

Together, these two features simplify management of multi-tenancy and cloud environments, helping IT managers provide consistent, policy-based storage services to their clients.

SCOS 7 will be delivered 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.  Dell PS Series customers who want to take advantage of the new PS and SC unified management and cross-platform replication capabilities can upgrade to the new PS 9.0 firmware, available this month at no charge with a current support contract. Licenses between PS and SC series do not transfer and a Replication license is needed for the SC Series.