“…the cloud is not a place, it’s an operating model.”
– Michael Dell
That quote says a lot and at Dell Technologies, we understand how important the cloud operating model is to all of our customers and where we can, we’ve included cloud integration, intelligence, and APIs right into our Dell Unity storage products. With these capabilities, customers can easily take advantage of cloud services today with built-in opportunities to dynamically shift into and out of public clouds tomorrow.
Let’s look at the top 5 cloud capabilities built-into each Dell Unity data storage array, a key member of our market-leading midrange storage portfolio. We’ll go into each one separately.
- Cloud Choice and Migrations
- Automated, Policy-based File Tiering
- Automated Forever Snapshots
- Built-in Cloud Intelligence and Analytics
- Foundation for a Hybrid Cloud
Cloud Choice and Migrations
With each Dell Unity, we offer you cloud choice and integration with public and private cloud targets you can use including Virtustream Storage Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3, as well as Dell Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) for private cloud. And very soon, we’ll also provide you with a Cleversafe choice with fully supported cloud repository migrations between each.
Move Inactive Files to the Cloud – Automatically
What if you could move all those inactive files to a lower-cost tier of data storage so you don’t need to manage multiple tiers of storage on your storage system? You can with the Dell Unity cloud-tiering capability – a fully automated and policy-based solution to move file data to any of the supported Dell clouds. As an example:
One of our customers in the Nordics had multiple systems storing large capacities of ISO documents. Because they persisted on premise, they needed constant management including time-consuming data backups as part of their daily IT routines – raising management and utilization costs. Realizing that this costly and inefficient process had to change, they implemented the Dell cloud tiering solution to automatically move approximately 80% of their ISO documents straight to the cloud. In doing this, they anticipated up to 60%* savings on their primary storage capex and opex.
Forever Snapshots – Always Having Snapshots in the Cloud to Restore
Without storage efficiency technologies, you can certainly recognize how the proliferation of snapshots can rapidly impact storage performance and capacity – hey, everyone wants a copy right? But if we look at the use of snapshots from a “project” perspective, Dell Unity can help resolve the need to keep them on primary storage after the project is complete with our cloud archiving solution to automate the orderly archive of full and partial snapshots to the cloud in order to stay compliant or maintain the archive for future business analysis and reference.
Using the Cloud to Get Smarter About Storage – Intelligent, Predictive Analytics
At Dell, we’ve always harnessed the power of aggregated data to make proactive decisions about the condition of your storage array before any issues have a chance to impact your business. Now, with CloudIQ, we’re taking this to the next level.
Every Dell Unity storage array includes full access to CloudIQ, a no-cost, and zero footprint cloud-based storage analytics application that leverages machine learning capabilities to identify system and performance anomalies before they impact the business. CloudIQ will also provide a comprehensive health score for all your Dell Unity systems based on data aggregation across 5 key storage functions.
And for our Dell SC Series family customers, CloudIQ will support your products towards the end of 2017. We know they’ll love it as much as our Dell Unity customers – take Svetoslav Nanchev, senior manager of infrastructure at Vivacom, who says: “Cloud IQ gives us good transparency on the operations, everything on one page. We are very happy and I can say that it was a great move. Dell has helped us to be more agile.”
A Foundation for Your Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Dell Unity interoperates directly with VMware vRealize helping you to easily and efficiently build and manage hybrid clouds. And for customers who want to automate it all as well as create direct cloud operations and communications between web devices, Dell Unity includes the REST API.
There’s no mistaking it, businesses – large to small – want to shift to the cloud since its being regarded as an integral part of their strategy, growth and success. We certainly recognize this and it’s why we’ve made implementing the cloud for our midrange customers simple, intuitive, and automated with every Dell Unity system. Oh wait, did I tell you that there’s no additional cost for any of the software?
Learn more about Dell Unity and its extensive cloud capabilities at: Dell.com/Unity
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*Using Virtustream; assumes 80% files inactive
