Dell EqualLogic Storage Array (PS5500E)

Dell announced new storage array today. Dell EqualLogic PS Storage Array, PS5500E, a virtualized iSCSI SAN Server, that can offer intelligence and automation with fault tolerance. All PS Series storage arrays include SAN configuration features and capabilities that can automatically detect network topology, create RAID sets and detect faults.

Architecture

PS Series storage arrays are designed in keeping the requirements like Automate management tasks, ease of scaling, providing a single and shared storage service, complying to the standards, highest possible availability and cost effective. PS Series servers has three essential components, PS Array, PS Group and Volumes. PS Series Groups are comprised of one or more Arrays/Disks. PS Volumes are comprised of one or more PS Groups of similar type. PS Series Groups exports the volumes to the host as LUNs.

Features

The primary and interesting feature is Auto-Snapshot manager. This snapshot manager provides the visibility of the snapshot status, schedules and backup job status. The biggest advantage is the recovery level. You can recover a single file, volume or guest machines in total. This is the clear and clever difference between Symantec Netbackup.

Can scaleup from 24TB to 48TB.
Pooled and Tiered Storage with Thin provisioning
Automatic load balancing
Multipath I/O
Smart copy for MS Exchange, SQL Server and Windows Files systems.
Volume cloning, snapshot and volume management
Automated management

Missing Features.
Though the new PS Storage server (PS5500E) has its own advantages it is deprived of key features like 10Gig Ethernet support, SSD support, Hard disk spin-downs and Dedupe.

To know more about the product visit the following link.
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/dell_ps5000e