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​Dell EMC updates software-defined, all-flash storage catalogue

Day one of the combined company's first conference in Las Vegas, Dell EMC has unveiled upgrades to its software-defined and all-flash storage suites.
Written by Asha Barbaschow, Contributor

Dell EMC has announced a bevy of new software-defined storage (SDS) products, adding support for Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation servers in an effort to help customers move from traditional to modern datacentres.

Updates to ScaleIO, ECS, and IsilonSD Edge, along with the introduction of Project Nautilus and expansion of the Ready Node portfolio, were announced on day one of Dell EMC World in Las Vegas on Monday.

According to the company, SDS makes the enterprise infrastructure programmable, and therefore more automated and easier to scale and manage than traditional infrastructure.

"While software-defined everything is a critical piece of IT transformation, the reality is that we're still early with regard to the ability of enterprises to consume software-only offerings," said Dell EMC president of storage Jeff Boudreau.

"Offering software-defined storage offerings for on-premises and the cloud, in a variety of deployment models including ready nodes, allows us to meet customers where they are today and take them where they need to be as they transform their IT and their businesses."

Dell EMC touted the upgrades as providing increased levels of performance and scalability across a wide spectrum of applications and workloads.

ScaleIO, the company's software-defined block storage solution, is expected to deliver inline compression, enhanced snapshots capabilities, and granular thin provisioning, in addition to greater performance and reduced latency using the Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation servers with NVMe flash drives.

It also boasts simplified management for VMware, with support for VMware Virtual Volumes.

ECS, Dell EMC's scale-out object storage platform, is designed to provide global data access to all types of applications, with ECS.Next boasting enhanced enterprise data protection and management capabilities, as well as advanced analytics support, and the ECS Dedicated Cloud Service enabling customers to use ECS through a hybrid cloud model, hosted in Virtustream datacentres.

IsilonSD Edge can now be deployed on a single Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation server, with platform updates also including support for VMware vSphere version 6.5, as well as deployment using virtual storage platforms like Dell EMC ScaleIO and VMware vSAN.

Dell EMC also unveiled a preview of Project Nautilus, which is a software-defined solution for storing and analysing high volumes of streaming IoT data.

Designed to work alongside ECS or Isilon, Project Nautilus is expected to bring real-time data processing capabilities to Dell EMC's unstructured storage platforms.

Continuing its focus on modernising the datacentre, Dell EMC also announced additions to its All Flash storage portfolio.

Using the latest Intel CPUs, the VMAX 950F is the newest member of Dell EMC's VMAX all-flash family, boasting 68 percent faster performance and offering 30 percent better response times -- 6.7M IOPS for RRH, 350 microseconds response times for OLTP -- than the previous model.

Dell EMC also announced the availability of XtremIO X2, which has seen its hardware horsepower upped and its price dropped by one-third of its predecessor.

According to the company, X2 provides 3x the capacity per X-Brick as well as new multi-dimensional scalability to scale up from 7TB to as high as 138TB per X-Brick, scaling out up to eight X-Bricks. X2's rack density has also increased by 4x, providing up to 5.5PB effective capacity and a capacity density of over 100TB effective per rack unit.

Dell EMC unveiled four new Dell EMC Unity All-Flash models -- the Dell EMC Unity 350F, 450F, 550F, and 650F -- providing up to 500TB of effective storage capacity, 4x larger file system with inline file compression , iCDM with snapshot mobility, simpler mapped RAID protection, and support for external encryption key management via Key Management Interoperability Protocol.

Additionally, Dell EMC Unity features an 8x increase in density and 8x more effective file system capacity than its predecessor.

Dell EMC also introduced the successor to the SC4020 array, the SC5020, which boasts up to 45 percent more IOPS, 2x max capacity to 2PB, and 3x the bandwidth than the former.

The company's Isilon scale-out NAS systems also received a makeover, with the "Infinity" architecture delivering up to 6x the IOPS, 11x the throughput, and 2x the capacity of the current Isilon platform.

It also enables Isilon to provide 9x the IOPs, 18x the throughput, and 21x the capacity of its closest competitor, Dell EMC explained.

"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," Boudreau added.

In addition to unveiling its PowerEdge 14th generation servers, new SDS products, and additions to its all-flash storage portfolio. Dell EMC also announced on Monday it was making its foray into the lending market, announcing consumption-based models from PC-as-a-Service, through to virtual machines and storage infrastructure.

Dell Technologies Capital, the venture arm of Dell Technologies, also announced its plan to invest $100 million annually in startups.

Disclosure: Asha Barbaschow travelled to Dell EMC World as a guest of Dell EMC.

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