Eight-thousand people from around the world gathered in Austin, Texas last week to presumably learn how the recent formation of the world’s largest privately held technology company would impact them.
They converged on the Austin Convention Center for Dell EMC World, the first major conference since Dell acquired EMC seven weeks ago for $67 billion. As appropriate, The Doors’ Break On Through was played each time Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of the newly formed Dell Technologies, walked on stage (Watch Dell’s 40-minute keynote talk on the Next Industrial Revolution).
Today, Dell Technologies serves 98% of the FORTUNE 500 and comprises several market-leading Sirius partners, including the former EMC as well as VMware, Virtustream, RSA, SecureWorks and Pivotal.
As the leader of infrastructure strategy for storage at Sirius, a national IT solutions integrator and a Dell Premier Plus Partner, I attended with a cadre of Sirius employees. Over the three-day event, we learned about the Dell vision for the future, coined the Next Industrial Revolution, as well as present-day tech enhancements that embrace hybrid cloud and hinge on three actionable pillars:
- Modernize by enhancing traditional data centers with state-of-the-art technologies such as flash, scale-out, and software-defined.
- Automate with VMware’s software to virtualize, automate and orchestrate workloads.
- Transform with hybrid cloud as the new standard for data centers leveraging EHC (Enterprise Hybrid Cloud) technologies along with Virtustream.
In addition to hybrid cloud, Dell Technologies believes multi-cloud rather than single-cloud environments will be the standard.
While it appeared that a majority of attendees were legacy Dell partners and clients, the most important news that may affect Sirius clients revolved around advances in Dell EMC technologies, and specifically support of, or integration with, the Dell PowerEdge server line.
Here are the top announcements with the greatest potential impacts to Sirius clients:
- Dell EMC Data Domain: Data Domain Virtual Edition (DDVE) 3.0 has been qualified to run on Dell PowerEdge servers, including some pre-validated, fully supported, pre-tested reference architectures. Last month, support for DDVE on Dell EMC VxRail appliances was also announced. DDVE 3.0 provides a 6x increase in scalability, capable of protecting up to 96TB in a single instance. DDVE support was also expanded to run as a VM on VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. Lastly, several cloud tiering and in-cloud application enhancements were made, providing data protection for both on-premise and off-premise workloads.
- Dell EMC Isilon: An all-flash version of Isilon was announced that provides massive density and performance. A four-node Isilon cluster in a 4U form factor has a maximum capacity of 924TB, 250K IOPS, and up to 15GB/s aggregate bandwidth. A single Isilon scale-out NAS cluster can support up to 100 systems with 400 nodes, providing up to 92.4PB of capacity, 25M IOPS, and up to 1.5TB/s of aggregate bandwidth. It seamlessly integrates with existing Isilon clusters, and automatically tiers across all-flash, SAS and SATA nodes.
- Dell EMC ECS: Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) 3.0 support was announced for Dell PowerEdge servers in this server-based grid architecture platform. Also, the D-Series hardware, a high-density appliance storing up to 6.2PB of data in a single rack, was rolled out. ECS Dedicated Cloud Service is a managed offering to provision dedicated ECS units at Virtustream data centers around the world. ECS is also certified to be a cloud storage tier leveraging Data Domain Cloud Tier. Support for Windows applications requiring CIFS/SMB access is also part of ECS 3.0.
- Dell EMC VxRail Appliances and VxRack System: Support for Dell PowerEdge servers was added for both converged lines. With VxRail, this provides 40% more CPU performance for the same price. VxRail enhancements are geared towards storage-heavy, graphics-heavy, and ROBO workloads. With VxRack, this provides more capacity and 40% more CPU performance for the same price. This provides 20 new configurations by providing the ability to add compute-heavy, storage-heavy or balanced configurations (in both all-flash and hybrid models) as needed to match workload requirements.
- Dell EMC Analytic Insights Module (AIM): This is a new offering that delivers all of the software, hardware and services needed for big data analytics and cloud-native application development. This delivers a self-service analytics experience while ensuring security and corporate governance.
Here is some additional important news for Sirius clients regarding Dell-heritage technology:
- The Dell Endpoint Data Security and Management portfolio was unveiled, including solutions from Dell, Mozy, RSA, and VMware AirWatch.
- Dell EMC OpenScale Payment Solutions expand the Dell Financial Services portfolio to include creative options for Dell EMC products and services.
- Dell SC Series of storage (formerly Compellent) is now interoperable with the state-of-the-art EMC-heritage capabilities including ViPR suite, PowerPath, VPLEX, CloudArray, Intelligent Data Mobility (IDM), Data Domain, Data Protection Suite (DPS), and RecoverPoint for VMs.
Sirius has a dedicated storage team of 100+ engineers with 570 years of combined EMC solutions experience, as well as 700 combined Dell sales and technical certifications. Contact Sirius to speak with one of our storage specialists, and learn even more by visiting the Sirius Storage Solutions page at siriuscom.com.
