Dell PowerVault MD3000

Dell PowerVault MD3000

The Dell PowerVault MD3000 is a modular direct-attached storage (DAS) array designed to handle 2-node clustering applications and other applications requiring high data availability. Built to attach to up to 4 Dell PowerEdge servers, the Dell Power Vault MD3000 array is able to attach to these servers because of their disk drive commonality. Configured in a 3U rackmount form factor, a single Dell MD3000 DAS enclosure can accommodate up to 15 Large Form Factor (LFF) 3.5” disk drives including both Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disk drive types of various performance levels and capacities. However, up to two further PowerVault MD1000 disk storage expansion enclosures can be added for a maximum disk storage capacity of up to 45 SAS or SATA disk drives and up to 90 Terabytes (TB) of storage capacity.

As a high-performance DAS array, the Dell PowerVault MD3000 modular disk storage expansion enclosure offers many other advantageous features beyond its disk storage capacity. Some examples of these advantageous features include support for multiple RAID levels including RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, RAID 5 and RAID 6, as well as a 3 Gigabit (Gb) SAS host interface and single or dual port controller options. Other beneficial features of the Dell Power Vault MD3000 arrays include hot-pluggable, redundant power supplies, cooling modules and disk drives, as well as active disk scrubbing, non-disruptive firmware updates, enhanced snapshots plus virtual disk copy and dual active/active RAID controllers with mirrored cache and multi-path I/O management. Last but not least, the Dell MD3000 DAS array can support up to 30 physical disks per group, but offers a much higher capacity of up to 256 virtual disk drives.