Dell PowerVault ME4012 2U 12-Bay 3.5-Inch SAN/DAS Storage Array

The Dell PowerVault ME4012 is a 2U SAN/DAS storage array from the ME4 Series with 12 x 3.5-inch drive bays (2.5-inch drive carriers are supported). It uses two hot-swappable controllers with Intel 2-core 2.2 GHz processors and 8 GB of memory per controller, and the 2U base arrays also support a single-controller configuration.

Host connectivity is Fibre Channel, iSCSI or SAS, with simultaneous FC and iSCSI multiprotocol: up to 8 x 16Gb FC ports (auto-negotiating to 8Gb), up to 8 x 10Gb iSCSI SFP+ or BaseT ports (BaseT auto-negotiates to 1Gb) and up to 8 x 12Gb SAS ports per array, with two 1Gb BASE-T management ports. The back end is 12Gb SAS.

Capacity grows through expansion enclosures on 12Gb SAS. The ME412 (12 x 3.5-inch) and ME424 (24 x 2.5-inch) can only be used behind ME4012 or ME4024 base arrays, and the ME424 expansion enclosure is one of them; the ME484 dense enclosure also attaches. The ME4012 scales from 2 to 264 drives, with a maximum raw capacity of 3.1 PB when an ME484 is added. Up to nine 2U enclosures or up to three 5U enclosures attach per 2U base array.

It accepts a mix of SSD, 15K, 10K and 7.2K drives, including FIPS-certified self-encrypting drives, with all-flash, hybrid or all-HDD layouts. RAID levels are 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and ADAPT distributed erasure coding, and the array supports thin provisioning, up to 1024 snapshots and asynchronous replication between ME4 arrays over FC or iSCSI. Management is the ME Storage Manager HTML5 GUI, a CLI and a VMware vCenter plugin.

The ME4012 draws 580 W and dissipates 1980 BTU, on 100-240 VAC at 50/60 Hz. It is 8.79 cm (3.46 in) high, 48.30 cm (19.01 in) wide and 60.29 cm (23.74 in) deep, weighing 32.00 kg (71.00 lb) at maximum configuration and 4.80 kg (10.56 lb) without drives.