Dell continues to blaze new ways to deliver better iSCSI SAN performance and scalability. The market leader (in terms of delivered performance) added dynamic storage tiering to the Dell EqualLogic PS6010XVS iSCSI SAN via solid-state disks (SSDs), whose data is determined by firmware I/O analysis. This firmware tracks accesses to blocks and moves the most frequently accessed sectors to the SSD, in much the same way hybrid disks do on PCs. Our benchmarks showed this design brought improved performance that matched particularly well with the needs of virtualization. Improved support for VMware vSphere added to the superior performance of the Dell SAN, which peaked at an eye-popping 250MBps on writes.
