Entry-level storage designed for small and medium-sized businesses
Enterprise-grade software included as standard
Optimized for SAN and DAS environments
Dell EMC announced the Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 series on the 20th, its next-generation entry-level storage for small and medium-sized businesses. The PowerVault ME4 series includes enterprise-level features and offers easy installation and management.

The new PowerVault ME4 series is optimized for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with demanding IT infrastructure but limited budgets and support staff. It offers enterprise-class features and software at an affordable price point, while also being designed for ease of installation and use, easing the burden on SMBs and driving IT modernization. Compared to previous Dell EMC entry-level systems, it offers significant improvements in capacity, performance, simplicity, and functionality. By increasing the drive by 75%, the raw storage capacity has been improved by 122%, and the read IOPS (input/output operations per second) performance has been improved by up to 4 times.

PowerVault ME4 storage is ideal for a variety of block-based storage use cases, including video surveillance, high-performance computing (HPC), virtualization and desktop virtualization (VDI), entry-level SAN, low-cost storage consolidation, video editing, NoSQL (Not only SQL, non-relational DBMS) databases, direct-attached storage (DAS), and OEM solutions.

The PowerVault ME4 series can accommodate from 12 to 336 drives, with a flexible mix of SSDs and HDDs and a 0-to-100% flash configuration. This allows for the flexibility to leverage the economics of disk drives with the high performance and low response times of flash. Capacity can be expanded up to 4PB and performance of up to 320,000 IOPS is achieved.
Includes licenses required for data management and protection, including data protection, thin provisioning, remote replication, snapshots, 3-level tiering, volume cloning, integration with VMware's 'vCenter' and 'SRM (Site Recovery Manager)', and drive-level encryption.

Additionally, it simplifies server capacity expansion through integration with Dell EMC PowerEdge 13th and 14th generation servers in an out-of-the-box form, and provides stable, high-speed data access to business applications in SAN or DAS environments.

The PowerVault ME4 can be installed in just 15 minutes, and it takes only another 15 minutes to configure hybrid or all-flash storage and start storing data. The new HTML5 user interface makes management easy, allowing you to configure and manage storage profiles and network connections from anywhere via a web browser, and respond quickly to situations when needed.

All PowerVault ME4 series storage controllers feature dual-core Intel Broadwell processors, and each array supports multiple protocols, including Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and SFP+, SAS host connectivity.

Meanwhile, according to a recently released report from global market research firm IDC, Dell EMC holds the top spot in the entry-level enterprise storage segment with a 31.6% market share (based on revenue in the first quarter of 2018), exceeding the second to seventh places combined. The PowerVault series is Dell EMC's flagship entry-level storage product, with over 400,000 units installed worldwide.