After three years of development, the latest round-number version of Dell Inc.’s storage stack is finally about to hit the market. The arguably biggest selling point of SCOS 7 is a new federated migration feature that promises to facilitate interoperability between the firm’s so-far disjointed EqualLogic and Compellent array families.

Organizations running systems from both lines in their data centers will now be able to move information back and forth without the massive amount of manual work that was required before. As a result, the task can be completed faster, which allows administrators to spend more time on other activities while reducing the inconvenience for end-users. The task is further streamlined by the fact that storage volumes remain accessible while they’re being transferred, which means workers often won’t even be able to tell when a migration is happening.

According to Dell, the ability to shuffle information around so easily will empower organizations to make much better use of their storage infrastructure than before. A dataset that’s usually kept on disk to reduce costs, for instance, could be quickly moved to a flash system if an analyst needs it for a latency-sensitive project. And top-priority workloads that permanently reside on solid-state memory can be managed more economically, too, thanks to new compression algorithms in SCOS 7.

Dell claims that the operating system is capable of reducing flash costs to an industry-leading 45 cents per gigabyte, while bringing the rate under 10 cents in environments that also incorporate spinning disk. To help users take full advantage of the functionality, SCOS 7 also packs an assessment feature called Volume Advisor that can provide information on how migrating a given workload to a new system could improve operations. The software will become generally available sometime in the next quarter as a free firmware update.

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