Dell Expands Storage Offerings

Dell introduced new storage systems on Tuesday designed to give customers more capacity and performance as the world's largest PC maker continues to expand its line of storage products.

The PowerVault MD1000 is a direct-attached storage enclosure that uses 3.5-inch serial-attached SCSI drives, which provide greater bandwidth than plain SCSI drives and more data throughput and capacity than 2.5-inch serial-attached SCSI drives, the company says. The system provides 4.5 Tbytes of storage and can be expanded to 13.5 Tbytes. Drives range in capacity from 36 Gbytes to 146 Gbytes.

The enclosure is also the first to be based on the proposed Storage Bridge Bay standard, which is designed to standardize the mechanical and electrical interfaces for external storage arrays, the company says. Prices start around $4,200.

The company also introduced the Dell/EMC CX UltraScale line of midrange storage systems with an end-to-end 4-gigabit architecture. The CX3-80 can support up to 480 drives with a total capacity of 239 Tbytes.

Dell is offering the storage systems as part of a build-to-order package that can include SAN-ready servers with host bus adapters preinstalled and a suite of software from EMC that includes its Navisphere Manager suite for data management. Prices start around $27,000.