Dell unveils Big Mike for iSCSI storage box party

Hungry for some attention, Dell will bring out the Big Man for any old thing these days. Take for instance the PowerVault MD3000i, Dell's new modular disk storage array featuring iSCSI support. Michael Dell himself was in San Francisco today to announce the new virtualization-friendly protocol option to the company's PowerVault …

[Anonymous Coward]

designing for succes - understand your audience

Is this the beginning of the "brutal honesty" marketing era I wonder?

"Roll up, roll up! We know you are short-sighted penny-pinchers who think they are saving money by hiring clueless admins and never bothering to get them trained on new product. Now with our moron-proof storage you can show you've been right all along! Join the lengthy queue of pointed-haired bosses over there sir.."

[Simon Greenwood]

re:designing for succes - understand your audience

It's good that storage is becoming demystified as there is a gap between the needs of the NAS user and that of the big SANs. This box covers that area pretty well - who would have thought it would be possible to have 6Tb in a 3U box five years ago, and who would have thought that you could *need* 6Tb outside of a major data crunching operation? I know of a couple of people who will be considering having one of these in their house. Those of us with a clue can't expect to keep our L33T 5KiLLZ to ourselves as by definition everything should become more simple in time. Therefore it is our duty to find things that make IT more complex in the short term...

[Anonymous Coward]

inept professionals

I agree that storage is an area where knowledge is still severely limited, but this statement:

"The MD3000i is designed to work for even the most inept IT professional." - isn't talking about a simplified system for home users.

Having rescued a large number of inept (and vastly overpaid IMHO) IT professionals from their own fumbles wrt storage arrays, I welcome an idiot proof box, on the other hand I don't think I'd want to be the storage admin walking in to the office tomorrow to have the boss tell him "we've bought this new device, it should be perfect for you."

[Anonymous Coward]

6TB in 3U? Pah, that's nothing

I had a look at these, they don't seem to be able to decide what they are, not big enough for enterprise, too expensive to be SMB.

If you want sheer dumb, huge storage. Check out the Nexsan Satabeast http://www.nexsan.com/satabeast.php

42TB of raw storage in 4U. Much more fun and comes in at about £23K

Failure rate of the SATA drives is relatively high but with RAID 6 and hot spares it doesn't really matter.

Well they work for me, then again, we only have 3 users per satabeast.... ;-)

[Bruce Cook]

Idiot Proof

As a programmer I once worked with liked to say: "It's idiot resistant, not idiot proof. If you make it idiot proof, someone will make a better idiot."