Today we launched Version 4 of Dell Fluid File System (FluidFS), our scale out NAS solution. This new version, available on the FS8600 with the Compellent platform starting today and later this year on EqualLogic, helps customers finesse the challenges of managing growth in the number and size of user files and support file-based workflows in specialized areas like medical imaging, media and entertainment, and scientific research.
The new version of FluidFS can deliver better performance at a lower price than the industry-leading solution. By expanding the cluster from a single FS8600 appliance to four appliances, customers can expand performance linearly up to 494,000 max SPECsfs file OPS and 11.9 GB/sec throughput, which makes the FS8600 one of the most competitive price-per-performance scale-out NAS solutions available. Customers can also manage large files up to 16TB and increase file storage capacity on the fly up to 4PB in a single namespace, which is twice the capacity of the previous version of FluidFS.
These enhancements give customers the ability to expand their network attached storage systems without performance bottlenecks or expensive hardware upgrades, as their workload needs grow. The FS8600 also leverages all the strengths of the Compellent Storage Center platform, including automated tiering, thin provisioning, optimization for solid state drives, the incredibly dense 84-drive SC280 enclosure, and award-winning Copilot support.
“We can deploy online demos, labs, and virtual classrooms in seconds, not minutes or hours, with the new Dell FluidFS solution. This makes our sales and support teams much more productive and helps them provide a higher level of services to our customers”, Maurice Harty, Director, Dell Demo Center
The FS8600 with FluidFS V4 now comes with 48GB of memory per controller, which is twice as much as before. We also added features that our customers have been asking for like support for more protocols, including SMB 3, NFS 4/NFS 4.1, and full IPv6 networking. Enhancements that enable tighter integration with VMware are included in the new release along with improvements in the file system itself such as directory-level quotas, security improvements such as SACL-based auditing, file filtering, and data protection enhancements in replication and NDMP.
With FluidFS V4, the FS8600 is an ideal solution for customers who need to deploy home shares and general purpose file shares within their application storage environments. It’s also an excellent solution for NFS storage in VMware environments and for file-based production workflows in healthcare, media and entertainment, video surveillance, life sciences and other areas.
FluidFS V4 and the FS8600 will begin shipping on April 7, 2015. For more information regarding Dell Fluid File Systems solutions, please visit www.dell.com/storage and follow us @Dell_Storage on Twitter.