I know what you may be thinking – that I’ve seen this Dell Unity blog before. I assure you, it just looks that way as we provide you with latest updates to Dell Midrange Storage. But this time, in addition to just product news, there’s an extra special message surrounding this blog post that I’d like to share with you.
Customers, partners and industry voices have weighed in to name the Dell Unity 650F All-Flash Array the CRN 2018 Product of the Year award as the Midrange Storage subcategory winner for Technology. This product award is testament to the best-in-breed technical innovation, reliability and quality Dell continues to deliver across the Midrange storage portfolio and affirms our promise to continue to innovate and invest in our Midrange storage offerings. In short, we continue to make Dell Unity better – and our channel partners and customers around the world are agreeing.
And so today, we’re announcing that we’ve made Dell Unity even better with the newest Operating Environment 4.5 release including expanded software features such as advanced data reduction, data protection, and management functions. And for our customers who are already invested in the cloud or those just starting out, Dell Unity also expands its cloud presence with more cloud deployment options. Customers will also benefit from the quality advancements that come with every Dell Unity release.
“We continue to be impressed with the enhancements that Dell has made with the Unity platform. The new OE 4.5 release that includes advanced data reduction technology has allowed Arrow ECS to more efficiently manage our data. Using the new File Level Retention and quota management software has enabled us to improve the management of storage allocation and regulatory compliance requirements while Metrosync Manager will help our business reduce unplanned downtime by allowing file synchronous storage resources to failover to our destination site in the event of a disaster”.
Seife Teklu, Senior Solutions Architect, Arrow ECS
Let’s look at what’s new with Dell Unity OE 4.5:
Advanced Inline Deduplication
- We’ve included Advanced In-line Dynamic Pattern Detection that considers all data patterns enabling you to see increased efficiency over OE 4.4 with up to 2.7:1 data reduction savings applicable to both file and block data.
File management gets even better
- Metrosync for Unity synchronous file replication that came with OE 4.4 is now enhanced with the addition of Metrosync Manager. Metrosync Manager will enhance orchestration, replication granularity and failover capabilities for your synchronous file replication.
New software to prevent file data loss
- New file-level retention capabilities will protect files from modification or deletion until a specified retention date. This is especially useful, for example, when companies are bound by new regulations and compliance requirements for data that has extended life cycles and require longer maintenance and retention periods
Software-defined storage with HA
- With Dell Unity OE 4.5, we’ve added native high availability (HA) for our software-defined Dell UnityVSA Professional Edition with 2-node, 2-core, and Tie Breaker Node for 10, 25, and 50TB capacity offerings. The Dell UnityVSA Tie Breaker Node or witness node is a lightweight third member of the cluster to arbitrate in the unlikely event all communication is lost between the two nodes to avoid data corruption. And don’t forget that you can always download and try Dell UnityVSA Community Edition for free.
But there’s more!
Not directly associated with the OE 4.5 release, we’ve also invested in advancing the ability of Dell Unity to participate in hybrid cloud environments – and it’s all available now.
Dell UnityVSA Cloud Edition runs in AWS cloud
- With our new Dell Unity Cloud Edition, you’ll be able to deploy fully-functional Dell Unity storage as a VM in a VMware Cloud environment with initial qualification for VMware Cloud on AWS. In this version, you’ll be able to deploy:
- Comprehensive UFS64 file services for VM Cloud
- Cloud-based DR capabilities with native asynchronous replication; and
- Scalable test and development environments without additional Dell Unity hardware.
Dell Unity validated with VMware Cloud Foundation
- Dell Unity and VMware Cloud Foundation NFS qualification allows you to implement “Do It Yourself” Cloud Building Blocks to design and build a custom cloud platform using best-of-breed cloud-enabled infrastructure such as Dell Unity. Dell Unity is the first NFS-based (i.e. File) external storage array family to be validated with VMware Cloud Foundation. It further demonstrates tangible benefits of buying the complete Dell Technologies stack and highlights our Dell Unity engineering investments in VMware.
Finally, we’re always enthusiastic when third parties seek us out to review our products. In this case, here’s a StorageReview paper on Dell Unity that provides a 360 degree view of the innovation we deliver – management, performance, architecture and software. I encourage you to read the review – it’s compelling.
As always, thank you for your business.
