Dell EMC announces major refresh to its all-flash storage portfolio for enterprise and midrange

After acquiring acquired EMC in a $60 billon-plus deal last year, the merged entity, Dell EMC has now announced major platform refreshes to its enterprise storage platform, VMAX, as well as the next generation XtremIO purpose-built All-Flash array to provide IT departments with the technology they need to modernize their data center and begin their journey to transform IT.

It also announced the next generation of Dell EMC Unity, its midrange All-Flash array and the new SC5020 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.”

VMAX 950F

The company claims that the newest addition to Dell EMC’s VMAX All Flash family, VMAX 950F is up to 4x faster than its nearest competitor in testing of real-world workloads. 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, VMAX 950F resets the bar for All-Flash storage performance. 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.

XtremIO X2

With XtremIO X2, Dell EMC has amplified the strengths of the previous generation by enhancing XtremIO’s 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 and 25% higher data reduction to support 2x more copies per cluster for iCDM. 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.

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, 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.

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 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.