Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 Series Entry-Level Storage Arrays

Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies, introduced the PowerVault ME4 Series, the next generation family of its entry-level storage arrays designed for SMBs.

The PowerVault ME4 Series can help organizations modernize IT and boost application performance, packing all-inclusive enterprise features into a product that is simple, fast and affordable.

According to new data from IDC, the company’s 31.6% revenue share lead in the entry storage industry is more than the next seven competitors combined ^[i]. The firm has an install base of more than 400,000 PowerVault units worldwide.

SMBs have similar needs to larger enterprises but must meet those needs in the face of smaller budgets and fewer IT support staff. Balancing price and performance is a reality for these organizations, along with searching storage solutions that are simple to use and manage. The company designed the PowerVault ME4 Series to meet these needs by offering a feature-rich, yet affordable storage array that is easy to install and use.

“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 GM, storage, 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.“

Powervault ME4048

The PowerVault ME4 Series family delivers increases over previous the firm’s entry systems in capacity, performance, simplicity and features. The company built the PowerVault ME4 Series with 75% more drives to increase raw storage capacity by 122%, while also boosting read IO/s performance by 4X.^[ii]

It is for a range of block-based storage use cases such as video surveillance, HPC, virtualization/VDI, entry SAN, low cost consolidation, video editing, NoSQL databases, direct attached and OEM solutions.

PowerVault ME4 Series is an entry-level storage array that delivers enterprise performance and features, including:

• Flexible array configurations – three models offer from 12 to 84 storage drives that can be configured from 0-100% flash and support any mix of SSDs and HDDs. This provides the capabilities to deliver the performance and low response times of flash with the economics of disk.

• Enterprise capacity and performance – PowerVault ME4 Series can expand up to 4PB and drive up to 320,000 IO/s. ^[iii]

• All-inclusive software – Everything needed to manage and protect data to drive the business forward including built-in data protection, thin provisioning, remote replication, snapshots, 3-level tiering, volume cloning, integration with VMware vCenter and SRM, drive-level encryption.

• Single-vendor integration – Out-of-the-box integration with PowerEdge 13th and 14th Generation servers simplify the challenges of server capacity expansion, providing business applications with reliable high-speed data access in either SAN or DAS environments.

PowerVault ME4 has been designed for ease of use. The array is customer-installable in 15 minutes and takes 15 more minutes to configure [iv] and begin storing data as either hybrid or all-flash storage.

Managing the PowerVault ME4 Series is easy with a 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 Corp.‘ Broadwell processor. Each array supports multiple protocols including FC, iSCSI (and SFP+) and SAS host connectivity.

Pricing and availability:
The PowerVault ME4 Series minimum configurations are available starting at under $13,000 (List Price).

Resources:
Blog: New Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 Series Makes Storage Simple, Fast and Affordable for SMB Customers
PowerVault ME4 Series storage arrays
PowerVault ME4 specification sheet
PowerVault ME4 DS
PowerVault ME4 Analyst WP
Video: PowerVault ME4 product intro

^[i] IDC Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, 2Q2018
^[ii] Over previous generation PowerVault MD3 Series
^[iii] Based on internal and partner performance testing report, 2018