Dell Technologies World: Dell EMC Storage Innovations Designed for Data Era

This article was written by Jeff Boudreau since 1998 president and GM, storage division, Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies, on April 30, 2019.

Dell Technologies World 2019 is finally here.

This event means a lot to me personally. Not only does it provide an opportunity to listen to the needs of customers and partners, it’s our chance to share the latest product updates we’ve designed to address the most pressing technology and business challenges.

One common theme of my conversations over the last year or so, is that we are all living in a world where digital transformation is defining winners and losers, and data has quickly become the most valuable asset for many organizations. Data is fueling new products and services, next-gen business applications, and powerful game-changing technologies such as AI and IoT. As this data capital landscape becomes increasingly complex, more attention must be paid to where data resides, how it is managed and how it is protected. I share here our latest firm’s storage innovations, designed to unlock and maximize the value of your data capital.

Introducing Unity XT – No compromise mid-range storage

Unity originally launched almost three years ago and thousands of customers have embraced this mid-range solution for its simplicity, performance, and affordability – in fact, we have now sold over 40,000 systems. This system consolidates data capital across block, file and VMware workloads onto a single solution and has a reputation for operational simplicity. CloudIQ adds additional storage monitoring and analytics – putting infrastructure insight in the palm of your hand.

We announce Unity XT Series, the next-generation of Unity. We’ve taken this solution to a new level including improved performance, greater efficiency, and new capabilities and services designed for a multi-cloud world. With Unity XT, we set out to deliver a storage array without compromise at mid-range price points. Some mid-range platforms, especially those that are active-passive architectures, struggle with processing data, running data reduction, and data services like replication at the same time without impacting application performance. Others force you to make trade-offs – like sub-par file capabilities, which limit the value it can provide your business. Unity XT has eliminated these trade-offs.

Designed for performance
Compared with the previous generation, Unity XT delivers up to 2x the performance ^[1] with 75% better response times ^[2] and supports up to 52% more virtual desktops ^[3] without performance impact. Furthermore, it is up to 67% faster ^[4] than its closest competitor. Unity is NVMe ready, which will further accelerate performance. These performance improvements mean faster operations, enabling to improve the level of service you provide to your customers.

Optimized for efficiency
The Unity XT improved its data reduction capabilities, now enabling you to realize up to 5:1 data reduction rate ^[5]. While that data reduction rate is impressive, the overall system efficiency is just as important, and Unity XT can utilize 85% of its system capacity ^[6] (from raw to usable capacity). Combining written data reduction guarantees and system utilization rates, Unity XT is now 29% more efficient than the competition ^[6] Speaking of guarantees, we now offer a 3:1 data reduction guarantee with no assessment for Unity XT as part of the Future Proof Loyalty Program.

Built for multi-cloud
Your data center is most likely evolving towards a model leveraging not just one, but multiple public clouds in conjunction with your on-premises infrastructure. At Dell, we are focused on providing solutions for your multi-cloud journey – including both the Dell Technologies Cloud and Dell Technologies Cloud enabled infrastructure. Unity XT is a core part of that strategy, as it can be a building block for the Dell Technologies Cloud, as part of a validated design. In addition, you can run Unity XT in a public cloud, move data to the cloud and is available as a service via the firm’s Cloud Storage Services.

Unity XT will start shipping later this quarter and will be available in both all-flash and hybrid configurations.

PowerMax innovation from Intel Optane to containers

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Since its introduction last year, the company’s PowerMax has delivered innovation for storage. Recently named 2018 enterprise storage product of the year and technology innovator by CRN, it solves demanding online transactional applications where low latency is critical, and the highest resiliency is paramount. PowerMax is defined by a powerful architecture, simple operation and innovation.

Market leaders tend to partner with other market leaders, and Dell EMC and Intel Corp. are examples of this. We have a partnership focused on innovation that spans decades. To that end, we have been working closely with Intel as the lead development partner for the Dual Port Intel Optane Technology drive – the next generation of media designed for the demanding enterprise storage environments. PowerMax will be a true scale-out storage array ^[1] to ship with Intel Optane DC drives used for persistent storage by year end. With these Storage Class Memory (SCM) drives, PowerMax system latencies will be reduced by up to 50% ^[2] – impressive for a system that already provides sub 300μs response times. ^[3] PowerMax’s real-time ML engine automated data placement maximizes SCM investment. The architecture of PowerMax, with end-to-end NVMe, combined with SCM, maximizes the performance of mission critical applications and harnesses the untapped value of data capital.

PowerMax appliances

We announce some ‘outside the box’ innovation with expanded automation and container support. We’ve taken automation further for VMware, Inc. customers and now offer integration with a VMware vRealize Orchestrator plug-in. This complete set of workflows, actions and APIs available as a PowerMax plug-in, automates operations and improves agility for VMware users. For non-VMware users, this summer, we are releasing a comprehensive set of Ansible Playbooks which can be used to build, configure and manage heterogeneous environments for the upcoming wave of new IT requirements.

As containers are increasingly leveraged for production applications, persistent storage has become a requirement. To support this, the industry recently finalized a standard API for container orchestration to talk to storage plug-ins – called the Container Storage Interface (CSI). We announce that the CSI plug-in for PowerMax is coming this summer. PowerMax – platform that can support everything from mainframe to Containers – all in one system.

Isilon – Manage data deluge, not your storage system
Industries such as automotive, life sciences, media and entertainment have been experiencing data growth for years. This growth is now expanding across multiple organizations because of the need to drive next-generation workloads such as data analytics and AI, as well as cloud native applications. Organizations need to run these workloads on-premises and in the cloud. This data deluge in unstructured data is what the company’s Isilon is designed for and why it’s become a leading scale-out NAS platform. ^[2]

We announce the latest Isilon software and hardware, designed to ensure you can spend more time unlocking your data capital and less time managing your storage environment.

Designed for simplicity at scale
As you’re inundated with more data, you usually can’t add resources to manage the growing environment. Isilon changes this narrative by providing scale out without the headcount. Our software release, OneFS 8.2, enables scale up to 252 nodes which means you can manage up to 58PB, as if it were terabytes, and with a 945GB/s aggregate throughput per cluster, your workloads can excel. ^[1]

Architected for workload agility

Not only are our customers struggling with data management and growth, they are struggling with data center space and have been looking for an Isilon node with the performance of a hybrid and capacity of an archive node. We announce the Isilon H5600 with 40% better rack density, almost double single stream throughput, 31% better write throughput, double the memory and SSD caching, all in a 4U chassis. ^[1] This has an impact on markets like media and entertainment, since Isilon H5600 will be able to support one 4k uncompressed edit stream per node. ^[1]

Optimized for multi-cloud
We love giving customers flexibility – especially as it comes to extending your data center to the cloud. We announce a few cloud enhancements for Isilon. Our Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services provides two paths to consume Isilon in a public cloud. We are officially announcing early access to Isilon file data services through Google Cloud Platform (GCP) this summer. This provides an experience to leverage the scale out NAS system directly through GCP. In addition, Cloud Storage Services provides multi-cloud agility with a direct connection to multiple public clouds – for DR, analytics and more. This service will allow customers to combine Isilon storage with the public cloud providers agile compute. Finally, we have enhanced Isilon CloudPools software to provide policy-based automated tiering that lets move data from on prem to public cloud – ideal for archiving. We have now expanded support to Alibaba Cloud in addition to existing support for Amazon Web Services (AWS), GCP and Microsoft Azure.

Isilon Cloudpools

Portfolio of storage products

Unity XT footnotes
^[1] Based on Dell EMC 2019 internal testing of the Dell EMC Unity 650F with the Unity XT 880F @ 8K block size for 100% reads, 100% writes, and 70:30 mixed R/W
^[2] Based on Dell EMC 2019 internal testing of Dell EMC Unity XT 880F 70K IO/s, 32K block size and 70:30 R/W
^[3] Based on internal application testing with VSLogin comparing Unity 650F with Unity XT 880F
^[4] Based on Dell EMC internal analysis, March 2019, comparing 100% read at 32KB testing results on a Unity XT 880F vs. a key competitor. Actual results may vary.
^[5] Based on a Unity 2019 review of installed base efficiency rates indicating specific customers with 5:1 DRR
^[6] Based on February 2019 Principled Technologies test data and internal technical sources. Actual results may vary.

PowerMax footnotes
^[1] Based on Dell EMC internal analysis of SCM drives used for persistent storage versus competitive mainstream true scale-out storage arrays, April 2019.
^[2] Based on Dell EMC internal analysis using the Random Read Miss benchmark test in March 2018. Actual response time will vary.
^[3] Based on Dell EMC internal analysis using the OLTP2 HW benchmark for a single PowerMax 8000 array, March 2018. Actual response time will vary.

Isilon footnotes
^[1] Based on Dell EMC internal testing, March, 2019
^[2] Based on IDC Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, March 2018