Dell’s announcement of a new Big Data Storage Data Retention product today highlights anew the company’s ongoing transition from consumer hardware manufacturer to business service provider.
The company says that the solution runs best on its DX Object Storage Platform, combining the ability to sharply reduce the amount of data that needs to be stored via compression and deduplication with advanced management options.
“Being able to cost-effectively capture and store all of the relevant data makes it possible to gain insights that support innovation and business value. The key is having the right data management solution to fluidly move data, tier it, dedupe it, protect it and archive it. To us, that means your data is fluid,” said Dell Enterprise Storage Vice President and General Manager Darren Thomas.
According to Dell, the ability to compress data by a ratio of 40:1 while still maintaining responsive connectivity with big data analytics will help businesses save on their storage and reduce its data center footprint. The company also touts extreme scalability as an advantage — when used with the DX Object Storage Platform, Dell says that the system can scale from as little as 2TB up to petabytes of data without the need for capital expenditure on standard file and block storage products.
The Texas-based company has been trying to focus on business-to-business activities of late, making a number of acquisitions designed to improve its technological expertise in areas like virtualization, cloud computing and big data. The most recent purchase was Quest Software, an IT management software firm that, it was announced early this month, would be acquired by Dell for $2.4 billion. That deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2012.
