Dell PowerVault MD3200

As a 6 Gigabit (Gb) shared storage solution, Dell PowerVault MD3200 storage arrays offer high performance as well as high availability data access. Dell MD3200’s are directly-attached Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) arrays with exceptional scalability and flexibility. This is evident through the MD3200 array’s ability to directly connect to either up to 4 high-availability servers or 8 non-redundant servers. In addition, Dell PowerVault MD3200 storage arrays offer a disk drive capacity of up to 12 3.5” SAS and Near-Line SAS (NL-SAS) Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and Solid State Drives (SSDs) but can be expanded to contain up to 96 disk drives by means of an additional hot-pluggable Dell PowerVault MD1200 or MD1220 expansion enclosure. Furthermore, the MD1200 and MD1220 allow 2.5” and 3.5” disk drives to be mixed within a single enclosure behind the Dell MD3200 array. This enables data tiering for optimized overall system performance.

The Dell PowerVault MD3200 offers a vast array of performance features that allow it to be ideal for large database applications, including 4 SAS ports and 2 Gigabytes (GB) battery-backed cache per controller (both single and dual controller models are available) as well as a high performance tier firmware upgrade for increased processing performance. Additionally, MD3200 storage arrays also work exceptionally well for the consolidation of up to 4 servers in a clustered or virtualized environment. When it comes to virtualized environments, Dell MD3200’s are best-suited for those utilizing Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESX. Some optional features that Dell MD3200 arrays can be equipped with for additional data protection include up to 8 snapshots per virtual disk and 128 snapshots per system, virtual disk copy (VDC) for point-in-time full replications of existing virtual disks and self-encrypting drives (SEDs) for exceptional disk security.