Dell Technologies Inc. has released its first product following its $67 billion swallow of EMC Corp. in the shape of a new software-defined storage (SDS) offering.

Called ScaleIO Ready Node, it’s an all-flash SDS product that runs on Dell EMC PowerEdge x86 servers.

The main sales pitch is that ScaleIO Ready Node allows users rapidly deploy a server storage-area network inside their existing on-premises infrastructure. Dell says the unit is a validated, fully supported SDS solution combining flexible PowerEdge rack server configurations with ScaleIO software, and is designed with enhanced performance, flexibility and scalability in mind.

Other benefits of the product include an enhance caching layer that makes the most actively used data accessible in more rapidly-responding media for applications that utilize hybrid configurations. The solution also offers greater operating system flexibility, delivering a server SAN that’s able to adapt according to business needs. The system supports Linux, OpenStack, Vmware vSphere, Windows Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012 deployments, Dell said.

Another nifty feature of the ScaleIO Ready Node is it provides users with a choice of deployment models (hyper-converged and storage-only) and configurations, either all-flash or hybrid. That means users aren’t restricted by having to grow compute and storage simultaneously, and can add them independently, as they wish.

The Dell EMC ScaleIO Ready Node

“Historically, having server-based flash led to poor resource utilization because performance and capacity were only supporting local applications,” Josh Goldstein, vice president of product management and marketing at Dell EMC, said in a blog post. “With the software-defined storage in ScaleIO Ready Nodes, the ability to abstract, pool and automate storage devices across a multitude of servers, and in turn, allocate as little or as much performance and capacity as needed to individual applications, is just as easy as allocating compute and memory resources in a virtualized environment.”

Dell has created a short video introducing ScaleIO Ready Node here and offers a free “test drive” of the ScaleIO software here.

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