Dell EMC is introducing new products in its all-flash midrange storage portfolio, and adding a risk-free investment protection program.
The company has launched its new SC All-Flash storage array to help customers modernize their data centres, and also introduced several software updates to Dell EMC Unity, as well as its Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program.
“I think the biggest benefit of these announcements is the scale that they offer because they can become very large platforms and grow with customers,” Mike Sharun, president of enterprise Canada at Dell EMC, tells IT World Canada. “If you look at these solutions, they can start as small as four SSD drives and can define an architecture for a customer that’s very small. As they continue to grow, the solution that the partner puts in place can grow with them. They can be confident that they won’t make their customer re-architect down the line when they grow.”
The Dell EMC SC5020F and Dell EMC SC7020F are being offered as 3U appliances featuring “dual active/active controllers with 8-core Intel Xeon processors with up to 256GB memory and multiprotocol support for 10GB iSCSI and 16/32GB FC network connections,” the company says in a Nov. 8 press release.
Other features include:
- All-Flash performance – Up to 399,000 IOPS per array and 3.9 million aggregate IOPS per multi-array federated cluster.
- Federated data mobility, scale and protection – Ships ready to link into federated multi-array clusters for easy, non-disruptive workload migration and load balancing; includes auto-failover feature for built-in business continuity.
- Self-optimizing efficiency – Intelligent data deduplication and compression, RAID tiering and pervasive thin provisioning helps make cost savings automatic.
- All-inclusive software – Every advanced SC Series feature is included with no extra software licenses to purchase or maintain.
“This is an all-encompassing solution both from a technology and a software perspective,” Sharun explains. “It makes it very easy and simple for our partners to order this, configure it, and actually deploy it. That’s important for the channel community because they don’t want to be spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to do these things, they want to spend time working with customers and driving business outcomes. This is the perfect solution to increase scale with customers.”
The SC All-Flash products will be available in December 2017.
Dell EMC Unity, the company’s hybrid flash storage system, is also getting a boost that will increase all-flash efficiency and lower storage costs. The new Unity v4.3 OS offers inline duplication, synchronous file replication to ensure zero data loss business continuity, and a new capability that allows online data-in place storage controller upgrades. These upgrades will be available in January 2018 to customers with a valid support contract.
Dell EMC has also unveiled its Future-Proof Storage Loyalty program that offers no-risk guarantees and value throughout the lifetime of customer arrays. Not only does the program offer “robust” guarantees, money-saving benefits, and investment protection for the new Dell EMC Unity and SC Series products, it also offers other features, including:
- 3-Year Satisfaction Guarantee – Dell EMC products will perform as advertised or customers get their money back.
- 4:1 All-Flash Storage Efficiency Guarantee – offered without complex pre-assessments and restrictions.
- Never-worry Data Migrations – customers can seamlessly upgrade to new Dell EMC storage with built-in data migrations that are always online and non-disruptive.
- Hardware Investment Protection – customers get flexible credit towards storage controller upgrades or trade-in credit towards the purchase of any new product across the Dell EMC portfolio.
- All-inclusive Software – Dell EMC midrange storage products ship with everything needed to store, manage and protect data with no extra licenses to purchase or maintain.
- Built-in Virtustream Storage Cloud – customers can automatically tier files and storage snapshots to the cloud at no cost for one year.
“We believe this is a hybrid world and we know some workloads need to move to the public cloud, so we’ve built in a virtual stream cloud storage as part of this so our partners can sit there and advise our customers on whether they should move certain things out to the public cloud or keep workloads in house,” the president of enterprise Canada adds.
The loyalty program is available now with the purchase of any new SC Series or Dell EMC Unity.
“In addition to providing a strong competitive advantage, the Future-Proof Storage Loyalty program will help open new doors for Dell EMC partners,” John Byrne, chief channel officer at Dell EMC, says in the release. “Whether engaging with current customers or in a highly competitive situation, we made sure these very competitive guarantees and benefits are like no other in the industry and are sure to drive interest from customers.”
