Dell Voted As The Overall Price Leader For Hybrid SSD/HDD Arrays

While enterprise flash adoption is clearly on the rise, Dell is seeing that nearly all customers (98 percent) prefer a flash approach in a hybrid array that mixes flash with spinning drives. The brand new Dell Storage SC4020 arrays, introduced in June, begin shipping globally on Tuesday, 2nd September.

Dell Storage arrays offer the flexibility to support all-flash, spinning disk or a hybrid mix and this approach is being recognised by its customers:

Last month (August), research firm IT Brand Pulse announced details of its 2014 SSD Brand Leaders customer survey. Dell was voted by storage users as the overall Price Leader for hybrid SSD/HDD arrays and for All-Flash Fibre Channel arrays, iSCSI arrays, and NAS as well as flash management software.  Since historically price has been the #1 barrier to flash adoption, Dell has worked to provide flash at the best economics in the industry.

In a Storage Strategies NOW independent survey a few months ago, Dell was chosen as the top choice among IT leaders when selecting a vendor for deploying flash.

Dell saw a substantial 7x growth of flash shipments in 2013 and continues to see substantial growth so far in 2014. Dell offers 100 percent all-flash (with MLC and SLC) at market-leading economics -- all-flash for the price of a 15K disk array solution with storage arrays such as the new Dell Storage SC4020. But it’s significant to note that 98 percent of Compellent arrays and 97 percent of EqualLogic arrays that are deployed with flash have had customers opt to also include spinning disks in one solution.

This hybrid approach provides customers with the best economics for their varied workloads and single management with one array.  According to IDC, the $8.3B hybrid-flash market is 10x the size of the all-flash market of $800M today and roughly similar market sizes are expected for the near future.