Dell EMC Launches All-Flash Storage Barrage

Dell EMC World is continuing the decade-plus tradition set by EMC World to be a platform for showcasing the future of storage technology.

And for Dell EMC, which after its historic merger became the world's largest storage vendor, the future of storage is anchored on software capabilities and the hybrid cloud.

To maintain Dell EMC's No. 1 position in storage, the company has continued to innovate its storage technology, said Sam Grocott, senior vice president of marketing for storage and data protection.

[Related: Dell EMC World 2017]

"Whether it's across the core tenets of the modern data center, scale-out, software-defined storage, next-generation flash technologies and converged offerings, we continue to demonstrate rapid innovation that is meeting our customers' ever-evolving needs," Grocott told CRN. "It's been full speed ahead on innovation."

Dell EMC makes a strong case about the importance of on-premise and hybrid cloud infrastructures, said Jamie Shepard, senior vice president for health care and strategy at Lumenate, a Dallas-based solution provider and longtime Dell EMC partner.

"Dell EMC is creating better performance and management of on-premise storage," Shepard told CRN. "They're putting a damper on the public cloud for primary storage, and are showing how to better leverage hybrid clouds."

Grocott said that nearly every Dell EMC storage product is being refreshed with new hardware and software. At the high end, Dell EMC is introducing the VMAX 950F, the new ‑ flagship of its all flash enterprise storage array family. New is a 68 percent increase in the performance as measured by IOs per second, as well as a 30 percent increase in response time.

Dell EMC is also debuting its second-generation XtremIO high-end all-flash block storage platform. XtremIO X2 offers a 25 percent increase in the data reduction capabilities, and supports scale-up in addition to scale-out to let customers add additional storage densities to previously deployed nodes while cutting total cost of ownership by half on a per-gigabyte basis, Grocott said.

Also refreshed is the Unity all-flash midrange array line with four models that take advantage of new CPU and memory capabilities. They offer 16 times the storage density and a 30 percent performance improvement over the current generation, and they can handle a maximum ­file size of 256 TB compared with the current 64 TB. Installation takes less than 10 minutes, Grocott said.

Dell EMC also introduced the latest iteration of its SC Compellent midrange storage arrays. The SC5020 has double the capacity of previous models, and offers 45 percent more IOs per second performance. It is the first in the SC family to support a wide range of Dell EMC enterprise storage software including PowerPath automated data path management and load-balancing software, ViPR storage automation software, RecoverPoint disaster recovery software, and Connectrix storage networking, Grocott said.

On the unstructured data side, Dell EMC is introducing a new architecture called Infinity to its Isilon storage line, which offers a 6X improvement in IOs per second performance and an 11X improvement in throughput. The new Infinity architecture brings Isilon its ­first modular scale-out storage system that includes separate compute and storage nodes to allow compute and storage to scale independently of each other within a single chassis. The company is also introducing the first all-flash Isilon offering.

In addition, Dell EMC is unveiling two major new data protection products at Dell EMC World, said Beth Phalen, president of the Dell EMC Data Protection division. "We're moving more towards turnkey solutions that are easier to deploy and that deliver a comprehensive set of features in one package," Phalen told CRN. The first is the Integrated Data Protection Appliance that combines the company's Data Domain backup appliance with its Data Protection Suite software.

"It will allow customers to go from install to backup in less than three hours, which is a signi­ficant improvement from what they need to do when they buy traditional backup and recovery from any vendor today," she said.

The second is a move to more closely tie the Data Domain appliances to the cloud with new capabilities, including the ability to back up data from workloads in Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services clouds to Data Domain and to replicate data between on-premise Data Domain appliances and cloud-based DDVE, or Data Domain Virtual Edition, Phalen said.

DDVE, which was released last year, currently runs in on-premise cloud environments, but some time in the second quarter will also run on Azure and AWS clouds. DDVE eventually will be able to run in any cloud environment, she said.