Category: Dell-EMC

Dell-EMC Product Design & Administration

Dell Technologies World – PowerEdge announcements

Dell EMC has announced the availability of the PowerEdge “xa” model (Xtreme Analytics, “xd” was Xtreme Density), where the ratio of CPU to GPU can be 1:1. They also previewed the new PowerEdge MX platform, which is slated to be released in 2H 2018. PowerEdge MX is taking the lessons learned from the M1000E and FX2 platforms and ties the emerging technology of Gen-Z to create the next-generation modular platform (Kinetic infrastructure stack – see slides at the end).

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Repurposing used XtremIO X-Brick

Recently we consolidated our labs at RoundTower and I re-purposed an XtremIO X-Brick into the Cincinnati Demonstration Lab. I figured it was going to be very easy, execute the “reset to factory defaults” command and off I go. You will not be surprised to hear, it was a little more complicated than that.

This post explains how to recover/re-purpose the X-Brick to a point where it is ready to provide storage services.

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Customer Perspective – Dell-EMC EHC

Whilst I was working for STC in Saudi Arabia, I spent considerable time building their Private Cloud strategy. One of the key decisions I promoted and evangelised was the adoption of Dell-EMC’s Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC, formerly FEHC – Federated Enterprise Hybrid Cloud). This post covers the decision making process I followed, the problems solved and the benefits and mechanics of EHC.

This post is the synopsis of a recent talk I gave for the RoundTower – Dell-EMC EHC co-event that we held in Boston last month, where we (RoundTower Technologies) are on the cusp of achieving EHC Partner status.

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EMC XtremIO – Dedupe: Replace a VMAX?

XTremIO I am currently testing my EMC XtremIO PoC system with EMC.  One of the great benefits of XtremIO is the Deduplication feature, which at a minimum will be 10:1, so the experts tell me and will be even better in version 3.0.  My current Symmetrix VMAX configurations are 250TB and 350TB of tiered SSD, 15KFC and SATA storage for 2 sites.  So assuming a 10:1 dedupe ratio, could I replace my two Symmetrix VMAX solutions with two XtremIO systems of 2 X-bricks (with 20TB model)?  It almost seems too good to be true!  From a price perspective, the XtremIO cost would be slightly cheaper than the VMAX (after the highly combative process of vendor bashing, sorry – negotiation, in my region) and from a space perspective 1/3rd the size (with SAN Fabric).  No need to state the obvious about performance.

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