Dell EMC announced at the recently concluded Dell EMC World 2017 in Las Vegas, major updates across its market-leading storage portfolio designed to provide IT departments with the technology they need to modernize their data center and begin their journey to transform IT.
As the business drives new digital initiatives, IT must transform to accommodate massive growth in structured and unstructured data, maintain the performance and reliability of key business applications, deploy a new breed of cloud-native applications and support increasingly complex workflows. To satisfy these diverse demands Dell EMC provides a diverse, best-of-breed portfolio – there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all.
Dell EMC announced major platform refreshes to its flagship enterprise storage platform, VMAX, as well as the next generation XtremIO purpose-built All-Flash array. Dell EMC also announced the next generation of Dell EMC Unity, its best-in-class midrange All-Flash array and the new SC5020 best-in-class midrange hybrid array, as well as Isilon scale-out NAS arrays.
“With these new offerings in high-end, midrange and unstructured data storage, Dell EMC is bringing best-in-class performance, value and economics to customers’ IT organizations,” said Niladri Saha, General Manager – Modern Infrastructure Sales, Dell EMC India. “The speeds and feeds are impressive, but more importantly, customers of every size, every budget and every stage of IT Transformation can harness the power of enterprise-class storage to move their business forward.”
Introducing the All-New VMAX 950F All Flash Array
VMAX 950F is the newest member of Dell EMC’s VMAX All Flash family, the flagship high-end storage offering that has set the industry benchmark for enterprise storage arrays for decades. With performance that is 68% faster and offering 30% better response times (6.7M IOPS for RRH, 350 microseconds response times for OLTP) than the previous generation[vii], VMAX 950F resets the bar for All-Flash storage performance. In fact, the VMAX 950F is up to 4x faster than its nearest competitor in testing of real-world workloads.[viii]
The VMAX 950F array leverages the latest Intel CPUs with software enhancements designed to deliver best-in-class performance at scale. It also allows customers to consolidate with confidence – including open systems, mainframe, IBM i as well as file workloads - on a single platform with a 25% smaller footprint for the same performance as the previous generation. The new VMAX 950F All Flash array offers all the industry-leading data services of the rest of the VMAX All Flash family – including SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility), D@RE (Data At-Rest Encryption), non-disruptive migration, inline compression and more. This powerful combination of performance, data services and more than “six nines” availability make the VMAX 950F the ideal platform for consolidating mission-critical applications that demand the performance of flash and can never, ever go down – such as core banking, credit card processing, electronic billing or hospital record systems.
Introducing XtremIO X2: The Next Generation of XtremIO
Purpose-built for All-Flash with always-on inline data services, XtremIO delivers unprecedented levels of efficiency to thousands of customers worldwide. With XtremIO X2, Dell EMC has amplified the strengths of the previous generation by enhancing XtremIO’s elegant software design and adding more horsepower to the hardware. XtremIO is the ideal platform for workloads that benefit from deduplication and integrated copy data management (iCDM) for large-scale snapshots, such as VDI and development/test use cases.
With a powerful combination of new hardware and intelligently enhanced software, X2 offers up to 80% lower response times[ix] and 25% higher data reduction to support 2x more copies per cluster for iCDM[x]. Dell EMC has engineered X2 to be even more efficient in storage capacity and All-Flash performance, at a price as low as one-third of its predecessor.[xi] X2 provides 3x the capacity per X-Brick as well as new multi-dimensional scalability to scale up from as low as 7TB to as high as 138TB per X-Brick, scaling out up to eight X-Bricks. Finally, X2 provides up to a total of 5.5PB effective capacity and a capacity density of over 100TB effective per rack unit.
New Dell EMC Unity and SC Series Models for Midrange
Dell EMC introduced four new Dell EMC Unity All-Flash models – Dell EMC Unity 350F, 450F, 550F and 650F – providing up to 500TB of effective storage capacity in a highly dense 80-drive, 3U footprint. Dell EMC Unity delivers best-in-class All-Flash performance and simplicity for the midrange with integrated support for block and file data. All new Dell EMC Unity models include 4x larger file system with inline file compression[xii], iCDM with snapshot mobility, simpler mapped RAID protection and support for external encryption key management via KMIP (Key Management Interoperability Protocol). Additionally, Dell EMC Unity features an 8x increase in density and 8x more effective file system capacity than its predecessor, as well as the ability to install in under 10 minutes, 33% faster than previous generations.[xiii]
Dell EMC also introduced the SC5020 to its family of economical and intelligent entry- to midrange-level hybrid storage solutions for block workloads. The successor to the popular SC4020 array, the SC5020 offers more power and scale, with up to 45% more IOPS, 2x max capacity (2PB) and 3x the bandwidth[xiv] in a new 3U format featuring 30 internal drive bays, dual controllers, plus FC, iSCSI and direct-attach SAS connectivity. The SC5020 boasts one of the lowest hybrid storage entry costs in the industry, thanks to the automated efficiency of built-in data progression, intelligent deduplication and compression.[xv]
Mark Peters, Practice Director & Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group said, “As enterprises seek to transform to be truly digital businesses, it’s crucial that they optimize both their traditional and next-generation application workloads based upon modern data center infrastructure. Moreover, since every enterprise has a unique set of requirements to support its business with data storage, a comprehensive portfolio such as that that offered by Dell EMC can make the processes of planning, acquisition, deployment and ongoing support far easier for most customers than assembling point storage products from multiple vendors. But one commonality is that All-Flash and scale-out storage solutions - capable of delivering both the high performance and rich data services needed for today’s demanding applications - are critical elements for any enterprise that wants to achieve IT transformation.”
Jack Rondoni, senior vice president of Storage Networking, Brocade said “Digital transformation is driving the rapid adoption of flash storage to support new requirements for a modern infrastructure that can optimize application performance and adapt to evolving data center needs. As the first to market with Gen 6 Fibre Channel solutions, Brocade delivers easy-to-deploy storage networks that will unleash the full value of Dell EMC’s new and future All-Flash storage products. With our long-standing partnership with Dell EMC, our mutual customers will benefit from unparalleled performance, proven reliability and greater visibility to mission-critical applications.”
