Dell Storage Point of View: Optimize your data everywhere

Fluid Data Architecture

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Executive summary
Business moves faster every day. The volume, velocity and value of the data you manage accelerates at an ever increasing pace. The only real constant is change, bringing a never-ending sense of uncertainty about what IT will face next. Its time for a new approach to dealing with change. Dell Storage and the Dell Fluid Data architecture keep your data as dynamic as the organization it supports by putting the right data in the right place at the right timefor the right cost. The unifying Fluid Data architecture is designed to automatically and intelligently optimize data everywhere, helping to transform IT operation into innovation. With storage designed to constantly adapt, customers can cut cost, time and risk as they focus on moving their organizations forward. At Dell, we have a clear and compelling point of view on the state of data storage and how organizations can keep pace as data needs evolve. We have the products, solutions and support that make our vision a reality. And we have customers with real-world results that will tell you how the Fluid Data architecture made an impact in their data centers.

The Dell point of view on enterprise storage Its no secret that legacy storage is static, too rigid, too hard to manage and unable to rapidly respond to the constant change that drives business growth. Dell has set out to build the right storage architecture based on what customers truly want. With bestof-breed technologies innovated in the last decade, including industry-leading deduplication and compression algorithms, the patented highperformance highly scalable Dell Fluid File System, world-class virtualization and embedded system intelligence, the Fluid Data architecture allows for dynamic storage that delivers new levels of efficiency and agility. Meet change head-on with the Fluid Data architecture.

The Dell Fluid Data architecture is designed to automatically and intelligently optimize data everywhere.

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Shift operation to innovation The Fluid Data architecture is designed to intelligently align operations with business processescutting the cost, time and risk of enterprise storage. Storage built on the Fluid Data architecture actively and intelligently manages data at a more granular level while scaling without restraints, allowing organizations to better respond to change while minimizing cumulative CAPEX over time as capacity increases. Information, the lifeblood of an IT infrastructure, is always available to those who need it where they need it. Fueled by customer-driven innovations, the Fluid Data architecture is built on engineering and design tenets that reect our point of viewa set of core beliefs that represent a path away from the inexibility of legacy storage toward the dynamic data centers of tomorrow. Storage should help you spend less while getting more To handle todays massive data volumes while controlling costs, organizations need to store more data on less hardware. Innovative compression, deduplication and automated tiering enable the Fluid Data architecture to help you use the capacity you have more efficiently. Cost-optimize disk purchases while also decreasing the incremental power, cooling, real estate, and management expenses that accumulate with each additional drive. Storage should free up your time, not take it away With the Fluid Data architecture, enterprises can streamline the productivity of often overloaded IT personnel. Intelligent automation and intuitive, pointand-click management save time and training costs while putting storage administration within reach of your entire staff. And with experts from Dell Services leading implementation and support, you can free up even more time for innovation.

Legacy hinders agility

Up to 80 percent of IT budgets go toward keeping systems running. Traditional storage solutions often fail to deliver the agility and efficiency necessary to shift spend toward innovation.

Excessive upfront costs and operating expenses Expensive, highly disruptive forklift upgrades Rigid data layouts, creating disconnected islands of storage resources Three-year hardware refresh cycles, repurchase of software licenses Complex integration with server virtualization solutions Extensive manual intervention to migrate data Fixed capacity and performance limits measurable ease of use

Storage should grow along with younot before The Fluid Data architecture separates upgrades from downtime. Modular, scalable design supports growth in capacity and performance without replacing hardware or undergoing expensive data migrations. Advanced reporting and accurate capacity and performance data help you easily see how storage is being usedand how to react. Buy what you need today and capitalize on improved efficiency and lower costs as you grow.

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Storage should preserve your investments over the long-term All too often, a three-year hardware refresh is assumed to be a foregone conclusion. The Fluid Data architecture seeks to future-proof your storage investment. Mix and match hardware generations as you deploy a range of storage devices, from primary storage to archive. Non-disruptive software upgrades and innovative licensing models keep storage focused on the businessnot the balance sheet. Storage should optimize your data everywhere Protecting and retaining data often goes hand-inhand with complexities and costscompounded when storage goes beyond production resources to include offsite recovery, backup, and archive storage. With automated tiering and load-balancing, the Fluid Data architecture moves data to the optimal storage resource. This helps increase storage performance, improve disk utilization and accelerate access to informationwhile your staff spends more time focusing on innovation. Storage should integrate seamlessly with infrastructure and applications Every admin knows that storage doesnt run in a silo. By aligning storage with the servers and networking at the heart of your data center, the Fluid Data architecture seeks to improve end-to-end IT efficiencies among business-critical applications, virtualization and virtual desktops, operating systems, servers, networking and the storage layer. Storage should protect your data from downtime and disaster Because data is key to success, organizations need to simply and cost-effectively keep it available for those who need it. The Fluid Data architecture incorporates business continuity and resiliency at the core and is designed for high availability with redundant hardware components, lightweight snapshots and failover features like remote replication. Dene and deliver the level of security, business continuity and disaster recovery that best suits your business.

Storage should work as promisedno excuses With extensive storage knowledge and industry-leading support tools, Copilot Support goes beyond traditional offerings with the right combination of proactive processes, professional expertise and support tailored to individual customer environments. Today available for Dell Compellent, Copilot Support helps ensure the satisfaction of every customer. Additionally, Dell Storage services offers a full complement of hardware and software implementation services, training programs and reactive and proactive support to help you scope, design and plan solutions to storage challenges and maximize your investments in storage technologies.

Maximum data efficiency

Slash the cost of purchasing and managing storage by up to 80% now and in the future

Greater IT agility
Instantly respond to change to increase and accelerate IT service levels

Dynamic business resiliency

Help ensure applications and information are always available to make decisions

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The Dell Storage portfolio

From primary storage to backup and archive and everywhere in between, the products in the Dell Storage portfolio can optimize data everywhere and put it in reach of those who need it most.

Dell Compellent The Dell Compellent Storage Center storage array offers enterprises a next-generation storage platform with built-in investment protection. Designed to gain efficiency at scale, Storage Center provides intelligence and automation to dynamically manage enterprise data throughout its life cyclehelping to ensure that information is available when and where it is needed. Together, block-level intelligence, storage virtualization, integrated software, and modular, protocol-independent hardware enable a cost-efficient enterprise storage infrastructure that delivers exceptional efficiency, agility and resiliency, lowering the total cost of storage by up to 80 percent. Dell EqualLogic Built on an advanced peer-scale platform, Dell EqualLogic storage arrays are designed to simplify the deployment and administration of consolidated storage. Automation and self-tuning features are paired with integrated software to help accelerate storage and virtual machine provisioning, data protection, and disaster recovery tasks. Industry-standard iSCSI connectivity enables organizations to leverage existing Ethernet network investment. EqualLogic is designed to gain performance at scale while maintaining simplicity, also helping to protect your investment by scaling across hardware generations. By helping to optimize resources and simplify administration, next-generation EqualLogic storage enables organizations to achieve enhanced return on their investments and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) compared with other solutions.

Dell PowerVault Designed for consolidation without complexity, Dell PowerVault MD storage arrays provide cost-effective storage for high-performance computing and scaleout server farms as well as departmental, SMB and remote office projects. The Dell PowerVault NX family is a unied network storage system that delivers versatility and expandability in both le-sharing and application-serving environments. Exceptional exibility allows you to match drives and performance to your needs while modular scalability allows for easy upgrades to support growth. Dell DX Object Storage Platform The Dell DX Object Storage Platform is designed to intelligently access, store, protect and distribute xed digital content. From Web publishing to archiving, it offers a powerful combination of data and storage management features, and an elegant, self-managing, peer-scaling architecture. Policy-based management helps reduce risks, while self-healing functionality helps maintain the integrity of stored objects. Scaling to billions of les and petabytes of data, you can add capacity nondisruptively without the need for manual conguration. Dell DR4000 Optimize your data management while reducing reliance on tape backups with the Dell DR4000 diskbased data protection and recovery solution. Designed to drop in to any backup workow environment, DR4000 delivers cost-effective deduplication and replication that streamlines backups and helps to eliminate redundant data.

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Address your pain points with Dell Storage solutions The Dell Storage solutions portfolio encompasses a broad range of systems, software and services based on the Fluid Data architecture. Designed to be future-compatible in scope and exibility as well as pragmatic in application, Dell Storage solutions leverage existing investments in IT infrastructure and establish a clear path to achieving effective and efficient data management. Stay focused on success Dell Storage services and the extensive global network of Dell Certied Partners help you design, implement, and maintain an effective data management strategy that helps to ensure application performance meets business objectives. Consult with experts to quickly diagnose problems and plan new solutions, and leverage Dell Services for implementation, training, and support. The Dell point of view: Storage optimized everywhere The Dell point of view on storage goes beyond legacy and looks toward what storage can be. By collapsing boundaries between technology and the organization, the Fluid Data architecture helps you realize maximum data efficiency, greater IT agility and dynamic business resiliency.

Talk to us, listen to them

Visit dell.com/casestudies to see how the Fluid Data architecture has delivered real results for Dell customers.

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