Dell Unity Storage Rocket Ship, Blast-Off Redux
Last June, I shared an important milestone; our Dell Unity storage array family surpassed $1 billion in cumulative bookings revenue since its May 2016 market debut. The size of that milestone is significant, as many companies or products never reach that level in sales – ever. The speed of the milestone is significant as well, since it was achieved in just over one calendar year. We didn’t think we could improve on that, but we did, and then some. Over the last year, we’ve made huge gains in Midrange storage.
For Dell Unity, we’ve doubled the cumulative bookings revenues to $2 billion in less than two years (22 months to be exact). We’re overjoyed that this new milestone came at a faster pace, in much shorter time than our last report. More than 22,000 physical Dell Unity systems have shipped, along with over 12,000 downloads of Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA), our software-defined version. Dell Unity has a variety of deployment models covered including Unified for block and file, Hybrid and All-flash versions, SDS (Software Defined Storage), and Converged Infrastructure (CI). And it’s all connected to the cloud.
The Dell Midrange storage rocket ship continues to soar, thanks to our partners, customers and staff, all of whom together make this happen. During the past year, we’ve made numerous enhancements to Dell Unity to ensure it provides a compelling feature set for customers with a wide range of workloads and business challenges. Our customers have benefited from the addition of compression and deduplication, to provide the lowest $/GB possible. For example:
- We released CloudIQ, to simplify monitoring and management, and it can even detect performance anomalies, where one-time performance spikes are easily detected against historical norms.
- A new set of controllers was released last year providing increases in performance and scale.
- Customers can create snapshots that never expire, in combination with our Cloud Tiering Appliance (CTA).
This is just one small piece of our complete cloud integration. From cloud-based analytics, to long-term snapshot storage in the cloud, and full integration with your preferred cloud vendor (Virtustream, Dell Elastic Cloud Storage, Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure), we have it all. Stay tuned for a future blog on these initiatives.
Here’s some additional progress we’ve made in the last year:
Just a few months ago, Storage Review completed its first test on the Dell Unity 450F. The results were impressive and resulted in an Editor’s Choice award. This is the first, and so far the only, storage array to receive the award in 2018. Storage Review added these comments “Clearly our lab is impressed with the 450F not just from a performance perspective, but from an integration one too. Of everything we’ve seen over the years, no storage array hooks into VMware so easily. The interface is perhaps the easiest to get acquainted with as well, perfect for the midrange target audience.”
Here’s what our partners think about the new release:
“We’ve been a channel partner for EMC for many years, and the Midrange Dell Unity products are a key part of our portfolio of products and services that we offer,” said Raphael Meyerowitz, VP, Office of the CTO, Presidio. “With the transition from previous models to Dell Unity, we now provide a unified, cost-effective Midrange array that offers a wide range of features to help our customer solve their storage and business needs. When the Dell Unity features are coupled with the product’s ease of use, and the new features added over the last year, we’re able to help even more customers. Congratulations to Dell for reaching this milestone. As a partner, we value our relationship with Dell and look forward to celebrating future milestones together.”
We also couldn’t have reached this milestone without our customers.
Over the years, they’ve provided feedback that we’ve incorporated into our product. I want to share some feedback from one of our recent customers, Rio Grande Pacific, which uses Dell Unity to support its short rail operations, covering 700 miles in six states to move 120,000 train car loads each year. Over 475,000 riders utilize passenger trains and 24×7 operation is critical. In their words, “Downtime is not an option.”
Their CIO Jason Brown, continues: “We needed our technology infrastructure to match our company’s aggressive growth. We can do that now with Dell Unity All-Flash.” “Now that Dell Unity is in place”, Rio Grande Pacific reports “The speed of our services increased tenfold.”
ESG labs has evaluated Dell Unity to provide real-world results that customers should consider. With ESG labs, the products are reviewed in a lab setting under real-world conditions. See for yourself by checking out the full report from ESG. Here are a few highlights from this lab report:
With the latest Unity All-flash line, Dell has designed an array that brings the extreme ease of use of an entry-level array with the advanced features you might expect in an enterprise-class solution. Simplicity is its hallmark…
We’re all familiar with the ease of use associated with consumer equipment. That was the target for Dell Unity as well; intuitive, and easy to use, for both seasoned professionals and storage generalists as well. ESG labs also commented, “ESG found Dell Unity to be as easy to install as a consumer networked printer.”
Security-conscious customers will benefit from the multiple new security certifications and compliance achievements recently announced for Dell Unity including: United States of America DoD Approved Products List (APL), STIG Compliance, FIPS certification and Common Criteria.
We’ve also recently announced an even easier way for our customers to get Dell Unity All-Flash storage into their environments through the Dell Financial Services OpenScale Flex On Demand payment program. Flex on Demand Velocity pricing models for Dell Unity All-Flash storage arrays will offer price points of less than $1,000 per month, and customers can run consumption-based All-Flash storage without needing custom configuration – thereby improving time to installation for storage deployments.
Flex On Demand reduces costs, enabling customers to pay only for capacity as it is used. Customers can take advantage of All-Flash storage on a consumption basis across the Dell storage portfolio and enjoy the operational and cost benefits of running on-premise workloads with a lower capacity commitment and a more flexible payment period through Flex On Demand.
Late last year, we announced the ground breaking Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program, which gives Midrange storage buyers the assurance that they’re not only getting the best product, but also the best customer experience and performance guarantees. Rather than play along with what other vendors offer, Dell decided to go big with our new Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program, offering stronger and longer guarantees, and unique benefits such as a free cloud-based solution to store snapshots forever, making it a great new way for customers to protect their business data.
As you can see, we’ve had a busy year. We’re enhancing our portfolio with the best products and programs available on the market. Like a laser beam, customers will seek out only the best vendors that provide a total end-to-end package. They seek award-winning products, industry-leading services and programs, complete financial programs, and global 24X7 operations. That’s how to win their business. And our customers have spoken. With their assistance, we’re proud to announce this major milestone. Thank you to our customers, our parters, and our employees, for helping us reach this milestone together.
