Dell PowerVault MD3220

Dell PowerVault MD3220

As a member of the Dell PowerVault MD3200 family of share Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) storage arrays, the Dell PowerVault MD3220 storage arrays are the next generation of directly connected storage solutions. While the MD3200 storage array can only be equipped with up to 12 3.5” disk drives, the MD3220 storage array can be equipped with up to 24 2.5” disk drives – whether they be SAS and Near-Line SAS (NL-SAS) Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) or even Solid State Drives (SSDs). However, through the use of expansion enclosures such as the Dell PowerVault MD1200 or the MD1220, the MD3220 storage array can offer mix and match capabilities for disk drive types and sizes, either 2.5” or 3.5”, within the expansion enclosure for those desiring data tiering abilities. Another benefit of using the MD1200 or MD1220 expansion enclosures is the ability to achieve up to 96 physical disk drives with RAID levels 0, 1 and 10. For RAID levels 5 and 6, MD3220 arrays can support up to 30 physical disk drives and for virtual disk drives, the Dell MD3220’s can support all the way up to 256 disk drives.

Other ways that Dell PowerVault MD3220 arrays prove their flexibility is through the many different options that they provide. For instance, MD3220 PowerVault storage arrays offer both single and dual controller options. Each controller contains 2 Gigabytes (GB) of battery-backed cache. The single controller model can directly connect to and support up to 4 servers while the dual controller model can directly connect to and support up to 8 servers. Other options that Dell PowerVault MD3220 SAS storage arrays offer are optional data protection features including snapshots, virtual disk copy and a high performance tier firmware upgrade. Additional features offered by MD3220 storage arrays include 4 x4 6Gb SAS host connectivity, Modular Disk Storage Manager software and a Java-based user interface.