The rivalry between providers of storage arrays is being ratcheted up several notches today following both the launch of a new all-Flash storage array for the midmarket from Dell EMC and the introduction of a program that among other things includes a money-back satisfaction guarantee for three years and a promise that Dell EMC storage systems will result in a four-to-one gain in storage efficiency.
Dell EMC today unveiled the Dell EMC SC5020F and Dell EMC SC7020F arrays, a set of 3U appliances featuring dual active/active controllers along with eight-core Intel Xeon processors with up to 256GB memory. The latest Dell EMC storage offering can be configured with 10GB iSCSI and 16/32GB FC network connections to provide 399,000 IOPS per array or up to 3.9 million aggregate IOPS per across a federated cluster consisting of 10 arrays. The arrays also come with built-in data deduplication and compression, RAID tiering and thin provisioning capabilities with no additional licensing costs incurred.
At the same time, Dell EMC announced an update to the Dell EMC Unity that makes additional data deduplication capabilities available across all Dell EMC arrays as well as a non-disruptive system upgrade capability and file synchronization software.
Finally, Dell EMC announced it has added built-in integration with the Virtustream public cloud. Virtustream is a public cloud service provider that is a sister company of Dell EMC.
Sam Grocott, senior vice president of marketing for storage and data protection for Dell EMC, says that thanks to advances in compression, IT organizations can acquire more terabytes of storage at a lower cost than ever. That’s created a level of unprecedented competition across the storage industry that Dell EMC is looking to further intensify by eliminating the need to pay for additional software licenses to manage storage.
Much of that competition, adds Grocott, is now focused on midmarket customers that are just now starting to make the transition to all-Flash storage.
“The higher end of the enterprise has already flipped,” says Grocott.
Of course, many IT organizations are wrestling with to what degree they want to continue to invest in storage arrays attached to rack servers versus shifting to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms. Most legacy applications, however, still expect to access external storage, which means for years to come, the level of competition for attaching external storage arrays will continue to be fierce. But at the same time, it’s also worth noting the number of legacy applications that require access to external storage is about to steadily decline.
