Dell EMC Intros New Products, Updates Storage, Data Protection Lines

Formidable storage giant Dell EMC drew some lines in the sand today with key storage and data protection product announcements around enterprise product VMAX, midmarket offering Unity and Data Domain, opening up new sales opportunities for partners.

Across the span of product news was the new Dell EMC VMAX 250F; the availability of promised HyperMax OS updates such as inline compression, mainframe workload support on the VMAX 450F and 850F, VPLEX VS6 and All-Flash for VPLEX; Unity upgrades; and new Data Domain products, as well as OS and Virtual Edition upgrades.

Targeting customers outside of the enterprise tier for the VMAX products — 450F and 850F all-flash-array portfolio — introduced earlier this year, the new VMAX 250 expands the VMAX offering to a new client base who are looking for performance capabilities, etc. similar to the high-end products but at a price point they could afford.

“These customers may be midsize businesses or customers that have different workloads not necessarily in that top high-end enterprise category where VMAX’s have traditional thrived — that’s the purpose of the 250,” said Peter Smails, vice president of product marketing at Dell EMC. Prior to his tenure at Dell EMC, Smails was senior director, product marketing at EMC, where he was responsible for EMC’s Core Technologies Division, including primary storage and data protection portfolios.

Compared to its predecessor product, the VMAX 100K, the VMAX 250F offers the punch of the VMAX portfolio, with twice the capacity and performance and half the footprint, Smails explained.

Reaching out to small size businesses, the VMAX 250F design supports 11TB usable V-Brick and 11TB usable Flash Packs (compared to 53TB chunks in the 450F and 850F) that scale to 1PB.

“From a partner standpoint we just plugged a hole and strengthened the VMAX portfolio so they can go out and be more competitive in a market segment where they weren’t as competitive,” said Smails.{ad}

In keeping with announcements about HyperMax OS made by EMC earlier this year, Dell EMC is today making available intelligent inline compression across the VMAX portfolio (250F, 450F and 850F). Inline compression together with Zero Space Reclaim and SnapVX lowers TCO for the customer and offers overall 4:1 overall storage efficiency, claimed Smails.

Dell EMC also announced Virtual Witness, an enhancement to SRDF/Flash Metro that eliminates the need for more hardware, again aimed at improving the TCO for customers.

On the mainframe side, dedicated mainframe workloads are now supported on the 450F and 850F.

For continuous availability, Dell EMC introduced VPLEX VS6 for the all-flash data center, the latest product on the VPLEX platform. According to the vendor, the VPLEX VS6 delivers…

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…2X IOPS or performance and one-third the latency and offers 12,000 volumes for scale-out.

The VPLEX for All-Flash is also new today. The software license is tied to a VPLEX engine without any limitations on the capacity or the number of Dell EMC flash arrays protected, the company stated.

“From a channel standpoint it’s all about simple, simple, simple. We upped our game on performance and scalability for the hardware and we packaged this so you could buy VPLEX for All-Flash at one software price, unlimited capacity for any number of EMC all flash arrays —  then you scale the hardware as you need to overtime,” said Smails.

UNITY

EMC Unity midrange storage product, introduced early this year, has gotten some upgrades in the Dell EMC portfolio. The three enhancements:

Today’s data protection news is the introduction of next-gen Data Domain, or a platform refresh including DD OS 6.0 and Data Domain VE 3.0; and cloud capabilities.

The new Data Domain family of products includes the existing DD2200 for small enterprises and four new products that are flash-enabled: DD6300 and DD6800 for midsize enterprises and for large enterprises the DD9300 and DD9800. The DD6300 is a turnkey-all-in-one appliance.

The bottom line regarding the new systems – higher performance, higher scalability, and higher throughput, according to Smails.{ad}

Data Domain Virtual Edition 3.0 is the next gen of the company’s virtual edition that features: scale up to 96 TB per instance; support on Microsoft Hyper-V; added cloud functionality; deployment on VxRail; and qualified with Dell PowerEdge Servers. “So Data Domain is available as a purpose built appliance and it’s also available as software-defined,” he said.

Finally, the latest DD OS, 6.0, introduces Data Domain Cloud Tier, secure multi-tenancy updates, DD Boost Everywhere; and enterprise-grade protection for Hadoop.