10 Hot Dell EMC Storage Products

Storage For A Modern Data Center World

The key to Dell EMC storage sales returning to growth lies not only in a robust storage market, but a robust product line, and the company in the second have proved it could go toe-to-toe with the best with major enhancements across its offerings. While some of the enhancements stemmed from improved hardware, including new Intel Xeon processors and higher-performance flash storage, the key enhancements were software related.

CRN looks at 10 key products in the Dell EMC storage lineup, one that offers the broad capabilities to match the company's position as the world's largest storage vendor.

Elastic Cloud Storage

Elastic Cloud Storage is a software-defined, cloud-scale, object storage platform that brings the availability and serviceability of traditional storage arrays to commodity server infrastructures in a private cloud offering. ECS provides comprehensive protocol support for unstructured object and file workloads on a single platform that lets customers manage globally distributed storage infrastructure under a single global namespace with anywhere access to content. Dell EMC in May updated the platform to include the ECS Dedicated Cloud Service to provide hybrid deployment models. It also introduced ECS Next, which provides enhanced data protection, management and analytics.

Integrated Data Protection Appliance

Dell EMC in May introduced its Integrated Data Protection Appliance, or IDPA, a purpose-built, pre-integrated appliance bringing together data protection storage, software, search and analytics to protect data across a wide range of applications and platforms. According to Dell EMC, the IDPA offers fast deployment of data protection for physical and virtual workloads, and lets coverage seamlessly extend to the cloud with native cloud-tiering for long-term retention to private or public clouds. The appliances feature encryption, fault detection and healing, along with an average 55:1 deduplication rate for data both on-premises and in the cloud.

Isilon

Dell EMC provides scale-out NAS offerings aimed at fast-growing unstructured data in its Isilon line. The Intel Xeon-powered Isilon portfolio, which helps manage demanding enterprise file workloads, is available with all-flash, hybrid flash or spinning disk. It provides high-capacity utilization and automated tiering, and can scale from tens of terabytes to tens of petabytes. Dell EMC in May enhanced its software-only Isilon SD Edge to deploy on a single Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation server to make it available at a lower cost point for smaller remote offices. The updates also include support for VMware vSphere 6.5, as well as deployment using virtual storage platforms like ScaleIO and VMware vSAN.

SC Series

The SC Series of storage arrays was developed from the Compellent line that pre-EMC Dell acquired in 2011. Compellent was known for its software-defined platform and the inclusion at no extra charge of all the typical software and services required, a model that is seeping into the rest of the Dell EMC storage lines. Dell EMC in November expanded the SC Series line with new all-flash storage arrays, the SC5020F and SC7020F. These 3U appliances bring dual active/active controllers with eight-core Xeon processors, up to 256 GB of memory, and support for 10-Gbit iSCSI and 32-Gbit Fibre Channel.

ScaleIO

ScaleIO is Dell EMC's software-defined storage platform that runs on industry standard servers to help support the block data storage needs of enterprises of any size. The company said ScaleIO provides consistently high performance of up to 10 million IOPs. It scales from three to over 1,000 nodes, and features high I/O parallelism with low latency, data snapshots, inline data compression, thin provisioning, and quality of service. The ScaleIO platform in May was broadened with the introduction of the data center-class ScaleIO.Next platform with improved efficiencies thanks to inline compression, enhanced snapshots, granular thin provisioning, and seamless volume migration.

Dell EMC Unity

The midrange Unity line of arrays combines file and block storage capabilities in a package starting at under $20,000. Unity is available in all-flash and hybrid flash and spinning disk configurations, as well as a virtual storage version providing enterprise-class data services on VMware ESXi servers. Dell EMC in July said Unity had achieved its first $1 billion in bookings only 419 days after it started shipping. Dell EMC has enhanced the line with the Unity v4.3 operating system, which brings inline deduplication to the all-fl ash storage array to help increase storage efficiency, the ability to do online data-in-place storage controller upgrades and CloudIQ enhancements for simplified storage management.

VMAX 950F

The new VMAX 950F is an all-fl ash storage offering that Dell EMC said provides 6.7 million IOPs, or 68 percent higher performance than the previous generation, with 350-microsecond response time for online transaction processing, or 30 percent better than previous models. The VMAX 950F provides high-performance storage in open systems, mainframe, IBM System i, and file workloads on a single platform, and comes with the full range of EMC storage services including SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility), D@RE (Data At-Rest Encryption), non-disruptive migration, inline compression, and more, all with six nines, or 99.9999 percent, data availability.

VxRack SDDC

The Dell EMC VxRack SDDC is a turnkey hardware and software rack-scale hyper-converged system combining the latest Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with VMware Cloud Foundation software. VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware's software-defined data center platform, combines SDDC Manager for lifecycle automation along with the vSphere compute, vSAN storage, and NSX networking virtualization technology. The VxRack SDDC scales to hundreds of nodes. Dell EMC in August updated the VxRack SDDC with its new VMware Cloud Foundation software for increased efficiency and scale, along with 40 new PowerEdge server-based configurations with expanded all-fl ash storage options.

VxRail Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance

Dell EMC VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure appliances combine PowerEdge 14th-generation servers with VMware vSAN software to provide configure-to-order platforms that deliver data services, resiliency and quality of service for simplified deployment of virtual desktops, business-critical applications and remote office infrastructure. The VxRail appliance offers non-disruptive pay-as-you-grow scalability of capacity and performance from as few as three nodes to up to 64 nodes per cluster. Customers can choose from general-purpose appliances, entry-level appliances, virtual desktop-optimized nodes, and nodes optimized for performance or storage capacity.

XC Series Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance

In addition to selling its own VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure appliances, Dell EMC is also the largest sales partner of the HCI software stack from Nutanix. It does so via the XC Series hyper-converged infrastructure appliances, which combine PowerEdge 14th-generation servers with the Nutanix software stack as a complete platform. The XC Series appliances are available with flexible combinations of CPU, memory, and hard drive or SSD, including NVMe storage, and include thin provisioning and cloning, replication, data tiering, deduplication and compression.