Today Dell EMC made several announcements updating their systems to all-flash versions, including their high-end, midrange, and unstructured storage systems. For its midrange, Dell EMC introduced four new, all-flash models to its popular Unity line. The new models keep the simple, modern, flexible, affordable storage that Dell EMC were aiming for while increasing density and performance.
Today Dell EMC made several announcements updating their systems to all-flash versions, including their high-end, midrange, and unstructured storage systems. For its midrange, Dell EMC introduced four new, all-flash models to its popular Unity line. The new models keep the simple, modern, flexible, affordable storage that Dell EMC were aiming for while increasing density and performance.
The first All-Flash Unity was introduced in May of 2016 with a starting price under $18,000. Since its introduction, Dell EMC has been working on improving it. The company states it has seen double digit growth on the product, but it does share the midrange slot with the more popular Compellent line that tends to steal the spotlight. As all-flash storage takes more of a key roll in the midrange market, Dell EMC is positioning Unity to take advantage of this with today’s newly announced models.
The new models include the 350F, 450F, 550F, and 650F, and are all based on the latest Intel Broadwell processors. Along with the new CPUs adding 40% more cores, the new models have double their RAM all to increase performance, especially virtualized and mixed workloads. The new models come in a 80-drive, 3-rack unit enclosure, with a density of 500TB per rack unit or 8x increase in density form the previous models. And Dell EMC states that the arrays can be installed in just 10 minutes.
On the software side, the new Unity arrays offer inline compression for file, and integrated Copy Data Management (iCDM) with AppSync that automates the creation and scheduling of snapshots and thin clones across applications with self-service for app owners. Customers can also take advantage of cloud tiering that has been improved by leveraging ECS private cloud support, and block snapshot archiving for public and private clouds. Unity has dynamic pools enabling the ability to add drives to a pool, allowing for higher space utilization, greater flexibility, and faster rebuild time. And with a built-in feature to Unisphere, users can easily migrate file and block from VNX to Dell EMC Unity.
All Unity arrays come with CloudIQ, a cloud-based storage analytics application. CloudIQ is stated to deliver proactive monitoring with predictive and smart analytics resulting in comprehensive health scores. These health scores give information on performance, capacity, configuration, system and data protection. The Unity arrays also come with the Dell EMC All-Flash Storage Efficiency Guarantee. This guarantee states that Dell EMC will provide a logical storage capacity at least four times (4:1) the usable physical capacity of a purchased Dell EMC Unity All-Flash array.
Availability
The new all-flash Unity models can be ordered now and are expected to be available in early July of this year.
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