When customers purchase data storage systems, there are multiple factors in the buying decision. Features, of course, but customers “buy” into more than just the current set of available features. They’re buying not just for today; they want to know what’s next for the product. At Dell, we’ve always been customer focused and we’d like to give our customers and partners more insight into our future plans for Dell’s midrange portfolio. In today’s blog, we’ll highlight efficiency in our Midrange portfolio with a spotlight on our deduplication plans for Dell Unity, our latest enhancement coming to the industry’s #1 midrange storage portfolio[i]. By combining deduplication and compression, we can offer customers ultra-efficient storage for a wide range of workloads and applications.
Forthcoming Functionality Increases Efficiency Even Further
We’re excited to announce that later this year we’ll unveil our data deduplication capabilities in Dell Unity. We wanted to give an early glimpse into this technology which will help our customers further advance their IT modernization efforts. These new features leverage a variety of advanced patents to eliminate redundant data. They are optimized to ensure the most efficient use of available hardware resources. In fact, we’ll support these improvements for all current and previous generations of Dell Unity.
Dell engineers designed the code to be an extension of inline compression so that applications that have compression enabled will automatically get more efficient. Best of all, deduplication will be available as a no-cost, non-disruptive upgrade. We’re really happy we can deliver the consistent performance levels that our customers expect while lowering costs – a win-win situation.
Midrange Portfolio Delivers Exceptional Efficiency Today
Today, customers can reduce their costs at every phase of their IT projects with our industry-leading midrange storage products, Dell Unity and SC Series (Compellent). These products give exceptional efficiency already. Across the board, we offer a range of data reduction features such as thin provisioning, data tiering and space-efficient snapshots that can reduce the cost of storage and maximize overall capacity. We offer software efficiencies through intelligent data reduction technologies which are backed by the Dell All Flash Storage Efficiency Guarantee offering a 4:1 efficiency savings benefit. For lowering longer term lifecycle costs, we offer platform migration and data-in-place upgrades. Together with the Dell Integrated Offerings portfolio, we can extend the management, mobility and data protection capabilities of our customer’s systems. The addition of deduplication makes the current portfolio even better.
Automate Your Cost Savings with SC Series
We believe the Dell SC Series today offers customers the most flexible flash architecture on the market. With intelligent data tiering running behind the scenes and always-on thin provisioning, customers benefit from the lowest cost flash on the market[i]. Other features offer built-in federation to recommend and live-transfer volumes to an optimal SC system automatically. Together, these give exceptional operational and cost efficiencies to enterprises of all sizes.
Simplify and Unify Your Storage with Dell Unity
Dell Unity is a fully unified, dense 2U system that offers an exceptional feature set, built-in migration capabilities from Dell VNX storage arrays, compression, and built-in data at-rest encryption (D@RE). Our compression has been measured at third-party labs to show a 2.5X higher compression rate than HPE 3PAR. [ii] With tiering to public or private cloud storage, your snapshots can live forever. This gives recovery options that weren’t possible in previous products.
Our customers are truly excited about the benefits they are getting from both Dell Unity and SC Series:
“With Dell Unity, we get enhanced performance as well as a number of features that make life easier for me. As an IT manager in a small organization I wear about 10 hats and the modernity, simplicity, affordability and flexibility of Dell Unity helps me to achieve more with limited resources.” – Madsen Wikholm, IT Manager, Society of Swedish Literature in Finland
“We chose SC Series storage because dollar for dollar, Dell SC arrays were the most cost-effective and they provide a great roadmap for longevity.” – Steve Athanas, Director of Platforms & Systems Engineering, UMASS Lowell
But our customers now want us to take this a step further. With the latest Dell Unity release, we’re making system administrators more efficient and effective with faster installation setup wizards and new features with Dell CloudIQ. Setup takes only 10 minutes and configuration just another 15 minutes. So customers are up-and-running in less than 30 minutes. Together, these advances help system administrators become more efficient, adding value to the business so they can focus on strategic initiatives and spend much less time on storage management. The next step in the efficiency evolution is continuing to provide the most data-efficient platform available.
When our customers made the decision to purchase Dell, they embarked with us on a long-term partnership. In that kind of relationship, strong communication is key. With great new technologies coming from Dell, we’ll share more information with our customers and our partners as we reach the next milestone on our IT Transformation journey. Stay tuned.
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[i] Dell internal analysis, April 2017.Estimated street price, net effective capacity after 5:1 data reduction including 5 years of 7x24x4-hour on-site support.
[ii] “Handle transaction workloads and data mart loads with better performance”, a Principled Technologies report, June 2017, page 2:
https://www.dellemc.com/en-us/campaigns/dell-emc/unity-all-flash-storage-vs-hpe-3par.htm
