Dell EMC Combines DSSD and PowerEdge Servers for SAS Analytics

LAS VEGAS, Sept. 12, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

News Highlights:

• New Dell EMC DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash solution leverages Dell EMC PowerEdge R730 servers powered by Intel Xeon processors, delivers faster, more scalable SAS 9 analytics.
• Near-linear scaling, with increasing performance, allows customers to easily scale their IT environments by simply adding and fully utilizing compute resources.
• Scales SAS analytics to at least 3X the concurrent users, applications and analytics supported by leading all flash arrays.
• Dell EMC to offer DSSD client cards factory installed in select Dell PowerEdge servers

Full Story:

Dell EMC Solution for SAS
Dell EMC today announced the new Dell EMC™ DSSD™ D5™ Rack-Scale Flash solution leveraging Dell EMC PowerEdge™ R730 servers. This optimal solution for SAS applications delivers game-changing performance for SAS 9 analytics, enabling customers to take full advantage of new innovative offerings from the SAS portfolio.

Customers can leverage DSSD D5 solutions for extreme storage performance to get more value from their existing SAS investments by complementing existing infrastructure to address bandwidth and I/O bottlenecks. Alternatively, they can leverage the Dell EMC solution to build a new high-performance analytics cluster for new projects.

The next generation analytics solution for users across all roles will enable customers to leverage analytics at scale and accelerate time-to-value for their SAS workloads. The Dell EMC storage and server configuration lowers risk, delivers unprecedented performance, reliability and flexibility to enable and accelerate analytics at scale

The mainstream 2S/2U PowerEdge R730 rack server is a datacenter workhorse, delivering highly functional flexibility to customers. The server's combination of powerful processors and large memory, coupled with the Dell EMC DSSD D5, enables faster access to data to support near- or real-time decision making.

New performance testing conducted by Principled Technologies shows that the DSSD D5 delivers extreme low latency access to data and can meet the bandwidth requirements of hundreds of cores (tested with 352 cores), allowing customers to consolidate their SAS applications on a single platform, run more analytics in the same time period and enable more concurrent users and applications. While demonstrating near-linear scaling with eight Dell™ R730 servers, powered by Intel Xeon processors E5-2699 v4, and running more than 800 and concurrent analytics jobs, Dell EMC DSSD D5 delivered a peak bandwidth of 22.8 GB per second. In addition, the solution illustrated SAS CPU/real-time ratios greater than 1.0, even with eight servers, demonstrating that D5 was able to keep up with CPU demand for I/O while ensuring that all computing power was fully utilized.

Dell EMC also announced today the availability of select Dell PowerEdge Servers with the DSSD client cards packaged together to be offered as a drop-in-the-box shipment. This year, Dell EMC expects to offer DSSD client cards factory installed in select Dell PowerEdge servers. Along with offering unprecedented performance, reliability and flexibility, the Dell EMC solution accelerates deployment time and enhances ease of use.

DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash enables customers to:

• Accelerate high-performance, analytic-intensive workloads that require large working data sets and/or predictable, ultra-low response times
• Increase analytic accuracy with higher frequency analysis on more granular data
• Enable more business users to make analytic-driven decisions
• Consolidate SAS silos to deliver a single analytics solution for all user roles
• Get full utilization of existing CPU investment and expand the types and sources of data to deliver more robust analysis

Supporting Near- or Real-Time Decisions

Businesses are under greater pressure than ever to use their data strategically to accelerate and improve decision-making while delivering next-generation business services. Faster data analysis helps organizations accelerate time to insight, improve the accuracy of analytics, expand analytics to more concurrent users and become more data driven. Flash storage has become the preferred storage media for analytics applications – however, as both traditional and cloud-native technologies continue to churn out massive amounts of data, today's data-driven organizations need approachable analytics for a growing number of users. With demand increasing for more sophisticated analytics that can support near- or real-time decisions, SAS analytics customers can leverage NVMe flash-based storage solutions, like DSSD D5 Rack-Scale Flash, to reduce data management overhead made necessary by performance challenges associated with legacy infrastructure. 

More detailed performance information can be found here.

• Analyst Report - Exec Summary 
• Analyst Report
• Infographic
• Performance and Tuning Considerations for SAS® on the Intel® Xeon® E5 v3  Series Processors and EMC® DSSD™D5 ™ Rack-Scale Flash Appliance

Availability
The SAS analytics solution is currently available, and factory-installed DSSD cards will be offered later this year.

Analyst Quote:
Mark Peters, Practice Director & Senior Analyst, ESG
"To support the most demanding contemporary use cases, flash and analytics need to go hand-in-hand. Thus, Dell EMC's approach of integrating SAS analytics with its DSSD D5 is not only a logical next step in the evolution of Rack-Scale Flash, but is also indicative of how quickly businesses are moving to real-time analytics as a foundation for proactive, reactive and preventative opportunities. This solution is further strengthened with the PowerEdge R730 server — which uses the fastest Intel processor available — to help speed critical analytics workloads and thereby enable faster decision making." 

SAS Quote:
Gary Spakes, SAS Global Technology Practice Director 
"Dell EMC provides a fast, scalable x86-based server and storage solution for SAS applications.  This allows customers to rapidly deploy and leverage a wide range of innovative SAS solutions. This new flash storage platform will accelerate data processing and allow scalability to solve our customer's most data intensive analytic problems."   

Partner Quote:
Peter Kear, Chief Executive Officer, D4t4 Solutions Plc
"We are witnessing ever-increasing pressure on analytics workloads as larger data sets require faster processing and shorter response times.  DSSD D5 offers our customers a massively scalable solution to those demands, giving them not just performance that can make a genuine difference to their business but also providing flexibility in resource allocation that maximizes the effectiveness of their flash storage.  In simple terms, the speed of processing SAS workloads with DSSD D5, coupled with consistently low latency, delivers throughput that helps more users perform more analytics – this enables our customers to better exploit the value within their data for competitive advantage."

Dell EMC Executive Quotes:
Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, President, Server Division, Dell EMC
"A high performing and reliable technology infrastructure is critical to any analytics solution, especially as data sets continue to grow exponentially," said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, President, Server Division at Dell EMC. "The Dell EMC DSSD D5 and PowerEdge R730 server solution enables customers to scale their SAS applications as needed and accelerate the time to value of real-time analytics that improve business operations."

John McCool, SVP and General Manager, DSSD, Dell EMC Emerging Technology Division
"Dell EMC, working closely with SAS, has set a high bar for performance and scalability. It's our mission to continue raising that bar, offering meaningful solutions to address our customers' most pressing challenges and enabling organizations to put real-time analytics at the forefront of their IT strategies."

About Dell EMC  

Dell EMC, a part of Dell Technologies, enables organizations to modernize, automate and transform their data center using industry-leading converged infrastructure, servers, storage and data protection technologies.  This provides a trusted foundation for businesses to transform IT, through the creation of a hybrid cloud, and transform their business through the creation of cloud-native applications and big data solutions.  Dell EMC services customers across 180 countries – including 98% of the Fortune 500 – with the industry's most comprehensive and innovative portfolio from edge to core to cloud.

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Statements that relate to future results and events are forward-looking statements based on Dell Technologies' current expectations.  Actual results and events in future periods may differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements because of a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors.  Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that projected benefits may not materialize as expected; that Dell Technologies is unable to successfully implement the plans, strategies and objectives, including the execution of integration strategies; and other risks that are described in Dell Technologies' Securities and Exchange Commission reports.  Dell Technologies does not undertake any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. 

SOURCE Dell EMC