The race to the bottom is on for flash storage.
The latest contestant in the enterprise storage technology is none other than Dell, who claims to have set the new lowest price per gigabyte for all-flash arrays.
The company announced that it is pricing mainstream read-intensive (RI) SSDs, for its SC4020 all-flash solutions at $2.09 per gigabyte, or about 73 cents per gigabyte for a hybrid flash configuration before applying data reduction technology.
On paper, however, this price is higher than HP’s solutions announced last month, which come in at $1.5 per gigabyte.
Dell’s solution combines data placement software and triple level cell 3D NAND technology with a virtualized storage array architecture.
In addition to the price, it noted that density for the SC series has been doubled to up to 90 terabytes per 2U array.
“Dell’s unique intelligent data placement strategy allows different types of flash storage—SLC, MLC and TLC—to be efficiently deployed in multiple tier architectures that can be more cost-effective than single tier flash-based arrays,” Eric Burgener, research director of storage systems at IDC said in a statement. “Dell’s announcement of flash drives built on TLC 3D NAND technology puts them in the storage density lead at 45TB per rack unit for flash-based arrays and drops the dollar per gigabyte cost of enterprise flash storage to roughly the same cost as 15K RPM HDDs—with significantly higher performance.”
The SC Series arrays will begin supporting the new flash drives in August.