Dell EMC to Offer SMBs Next-Gen Storage Arrays

Dell EMC on Wednesday rolled out new PowerVault ME4 Series storage arrays that take aim at the small and medium-size business (SMB) market. The new entry-level storage products boast enterprise features, quick installation and easy management, the vendor said.

Faced with fewer internal IT and budget resources than larger enterprise businesses, SMBs still have storage requirements for a wide range of business applications and use cases. With that in mind, the new Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 Series storage arrays are purpose-built and priced for this market segment.

“Earlier this year, we made a commitment to simplify and streamline our storage portfolio to make it easier for customers to do business with us,” said Jeff Boudreau, president and general manager of storage at Dell EMC. “The new PowerVault ME4 Series is a key part of that strategy at the entry level, designed for customers looking for an affordable, yet fully featured storage array that’s optimized for SAN and DAS virtualized workloads.”

The new PowerVault ME4 Series family delivers significant increases over previous Dell EMC entry systems in capacity, performance, simplicity and features. Dell EMC built the PowerVault ME4 Series with 75 percent more drives to increase raw storage capacity by 122 percent, while also boosting read IOPS performance by 4X.

Jeff Boudreau

Jeff Boudreau

It’s ideal for block-based storage use cases such as video surveillance, high performance computing (HPC), virtualization/VDI, entry SAN, low-cost consolidation, video editing, NoSQL databases, direct attached and OEM solutions, Dell EMC said.

This month, IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker reported that vendor revenue in worldwide enterprise storage systems increased by more than 21 percent year over year, to $13.2 billion, during the second quarter of 2018. Total capacity shipments were up almost 711 percent, to nearly 112 exabytes during the quarter.

Dell Inc. was the largest supplier for the quarter, accounting for more than 19 percent of total worldwide enterprise storage systems revenue. HPE/New H3C Group was the second largest, trailing Dell EMC with a little more than 17 percent market share, according to IDC.

Here are some PowerVault ME4 Series features:

There’s also a new HTML5 user interface, enabling customers to use a web browser from anywhere to handle common management tasks such as configuring and managing storage profiles and network connections, responding to alerts and more.

Every PowerVault ME4 Series storage controller is powered by a dual-core Intel Broadwell processor. Each array supports multiple protocols including Fibre Channel, iSCSI (and SFP+) and SAS host connectivity.

The new PowerVault ME4 Series minimum configurations are available with pricing starting at under $13,000 (U.S. list price).