First Fruits of Dell EMC Union Appear In Storage, Hyperconverged Infrastructure Products

This year’s Dell EMC World was the first since the two companies merged and the marriage flavoured the majority of the products the enlarged firm discussed at the show in Austin.

CEO Michael Dell and his colleagues spoke at great length about the virtues of the hybrid cloud and digital transformation and this was evident in the storage, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), service, and security announcements it made.

And the combination of the two companies’ portfolios is already underway.

Hybrid cloud

This was especially true in Dell EMC’s updated VxRail HCI appliance range. Combining EMC’s all-flash technology with Dell’s PowerEdge servers, the updated systems promise better economics, more configurations and more power.

Dell EMC claims they offer 40 percent more CPU performance for the price, can support more than 200 virtual machines and are available for less than $50,000. The VXRail can be built out using VxRack, which scales to thousands of nodes and 10,000s of virtual machines, and includes integrated networking.

The company’s first joint storage product was also on show. Formerly known as ‘Project Nitro’, Dell EMC Isilon is an all-flash network attached storage (NAS) system built for unstructured workloads. A choice of analytics paltforms can be layered on top of it and several units can be combined into a single cluster that can deliver up to 92.4 petabytes of capacity and more than 1.5Tbps of aggregate bandwidth.

“As businesses move towards a digital future, there is an increasing need to support large-scale workloads that utilise unstructured data at unprecedented speeds,” claimed Phil Bullinger, head of Isilon at Dell EMC. “This can’t be done with hardware alone—software is the key to enabling customers to modernize their data centres, and the determining factor for the winners and losers in the All-Flash market.”

Modern data centre

During his keynote speech, Michael Dell declared the modernisation of the data centre was essential in the journey to digital transformation. It disclosed details of a new software-defined version of its Data Domain platform that will help customers manage data protection on cloud and on-premise workloads and how it plans to help protect applications running on Microsoft Azure.

Dell EMC Analytics Insight Module combines software, hardware and services to create an environment for big data analytics, promising multiple data sources can be analysed rapidly, either within the enterprise or on the cloud – strengthening the firm’s overall hybrid vision.

There was also an update to Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), which has now reached version 3.0, and can run on PowerEdge servers. It also has support for Windows applications, better monitoring and compliance capabilities and has a dedicated cloud service hosted by Virtustream.

“ECS is purpose-built to help customers transform their data centres—and their businesses—while breaking down data silos, leveraging the flexibility of software-defined storage and choosing the right cloud formula to store and harness data to help drive organisations forward,” added Manuvir Das, general manager of Dell EMC’s advanced software division.

Security union

But there was crossover in security too. For its £50 billion, Dell didn’t just acquire EMC, but also its family of companies. A new endpoint security suite combines technology from Mozy, RSA and VMware’s AirWatch with Dell’s own data security.

Dell EMC says the new suite protects against threats proactively, offers a range of response tools, single-sign on and device management, vital for companies with bring your own device (BYOD) policies.

Although the company was keen to point out it had only been under one roof for six weeks, the first fruits of the blockbuster merger are here.

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