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Internal Storage expansion

For customers looking to take advantage of SDS or simply to utilize SAS as their primary

disk storage, the new MX-series offers enhanced local drive support with up to 6 hot plug

drives in the MX740c and 8 hot plug drives in the MX840c. Both models also support 2

internal mirrored M.2 drives with the optional BOSS card. Additional expansion is

available with the MX5016s storage sled. This sled houses up to 16 x 2.5” dual port SAS

drives which connect through a pair of redundant SAS switches to provide additional

storage internal to the enclosure. Drives hosted in this sled can be dedicated to a single

server, be divided amongst all of the servers or, have their capacity aggregated and

shared amongst all of the servers in the enclosure in operating environments that support

this mode. For more demanding environments, multiple MX5016s sleds can be added to a

single enclosure to increase the number of disks available to the servers.

External Storage expansion

For customers looking to connect to an existing FC SAN, the optional redundant FC switches support connection speeds

of up to 32Gb/s and integrate into existing SAN fabrics without compromise.

Integration with existing FCoE or iSCSI environments can be accomplished natively through the optional Ethernet switch

options for the MX. For FCoE, these switches can be configured to pass traffic directly through to an external gateway.

Additionally, the MX9116n FSE can be configured as an NPIV gateway to an existing Brocade or Cisco MDS SAN.

As noted above, the MX9116n FSE can also be directly connected to a Dell EMC or 3

party FC storage array. This

mode provides access to shared storage that is dedicated to the devices connected to the MX Scalable Fabric and

reduces complexity and latency to serve demanding application environments like big data.

Conclusion

As workloads have evolved, storage technologies have been dramatically affected. Customers now find that they often

require multiple storage options in their environment to meet this need. Optimizing storage for a virtualization

environment often means deploying a Software Defined Storage solutions like Microsoft Storage Spaces, VMWare vSAN

or Dell EMC ScaleIO. This approach requires large pools of server based storage devices. Optimizing for solutions like

in-memory database can be more complex with scale-up solutions requiring extremely fast server based storage and

scale-out solutions benefiting from SAN based storage solutions. Similarly, big data solutions may require extremely

large pools of centralized storage to deliver the capacity necessary for large data-sets.

Regardless of the storage technology required, the PowerEdge MX-Series delivers. From multiple connection options for

SAN to a robust, flexible architecture for server based storage, customers can configure the MX system for

uncompromised storage optimization.