Today Dell is announcing one of the lowest cost all-flash arrays (AFA) in the industry, the Dell Storage SC4020 Entry-Level All-Flash array. The new all-flash array configuration essentially halves the entry-level AFA configurations Dell offers today, giving them a major pricing advantage. Dell indicates 98% of their SC4000-class arrays are going out the door in hybrid configurations, the aggressive $25,000 price-point simply incents more organizations to sample the benefits of flash with enterprise-ready data services and support.
Today Dell is announcing one of the lowest cost all-flash arrays (AFA) in the industry, the Dell Storage SC4020 Entry-Level All-Flash array. The new all-flash array configuration essentially halves the entry-level AFA configurations Dell offers today, giving them a major pricing advantage. Dell indicates 98% of their SC4000-class arrays are going out the door in hybrid configurations, the aggressive $25,000 price-point simply incents more organizations to sample the benefits of flash with enterprise-ready data services and support.
The SC4020 of course isn't new, but what Dell is doing here is applying more pricing pressure to a small flash configuration in order to make a flash array more friendly to the masses. Dell was the first major vendor to market all-flash arrays for the price of traditional HDD solutions. With their new lower cost all-flash SC4020, Dell will give smaller organizations a high performance array at a lower initial investment.
The entry configuration of the SC4020 supports 2.8TB of raw capacity and 2TB of usable capacity, thanks to 6x 480GB MLC SSDs. The arrays come with Dell's full suite of data services and software integrations. Users that need to expand capacity can easily add one or more tiers of spinning disk to the same array, or more SSDs may be included based on performance needs.
Availability and pricing
The all-flash SC4020 array will be available early 2015 and has a starting price of $25,000.
Update: Our review of the SC4020 array
