Dell EMC Unity Midrange Storage Advances Data Reduction, Data Protection, and Management in Latest OS Update

I know what you may be thinking – that I’ve seen this Dell EMC Unity blog before. I assure you, it just looks that way as we provide you with latest updates to Dell EMC Midrange Storage. But this time, in addition to just product news, there’s an extra special message surrounding this blog post that I’d like to share with you.

Customers, partners and industry voices have weighed in to name the Dell EMC Unity 650F All-Flash Array the CRN 2018 Product of the Year award as the Midrange Storage subcategory winner for Technology. This product award is testament to the best-in-breed technical innovation, reliability and quality Dell EMC continues to deliver across the Midrange storage portfolio and affirms our promise to continue to innovate and invest in our Midrange storage offerings. In short, we continue to make Dell EMC Unity better – and our channel partners and customers around the world are agreeing.

And so today, we’re announcing that we’ve made Dell EMC Unity even better with the newest Operating Environment 4.5 release including expanded software features such as advanced data reduction, data protection, and management functions. And for our customers who are already invested in the cloud or those just starting out, Dell EMC Unity also expands its cloud presence with more cloud deployment options. Customers will also benefit from the quality advancements that come with every Dell EMC Unity release.

“We continue to be impressed with the enhancements that Dell EMC has made with the Unity platform. The new OE 4.5 release that includes advanced data reduction technology has allowed Arrow ECS to more efficiently manage our data. Using the new File Level Retention and quota management software has enabled us to improve the management of storage allocation and regulatory compliance requirements while Metrosync Manager will help our business reduce unplanned downtime by allowing file synchronous storage resources to failover to our destination site in the event of a disaster”.

Seife Teklu, Senior Solutions Architect, Arrow ECS                                                          

Let’s look at what’s new with Dell EMC Unity OE 4.5:

Advanced Inline Deduplication

  • We’ve included Advanced In-line Dynamic Pattern Detection that considers all data patterns enabling you to see increased efficiency over OE 4.4 with up to 2.7:1 data reduction savings applicable to both file and block data.

File management gets even better

  • Metrosync for Unity synchronous file replication that came with OE 4.4 is now enhanced with the addition of Metrosync Manager. Metrosync Manager will enhance orchestration, replication granularity and failover capabilities for your synchronous file replication.

New software to prevent file data loss  

  • New file-level retention capabilities will protect files from modification or deletion until a specified retention date. This is especially useful, for example, when companies are bound by new regulations and compliance requirements for data that has extended life cycles and require longer maintenance and retention periods

Software-defined storage with HA

  • With Dell EMC Unity OE 4.5, we’ve added native high availability (HA) for our software-defined Dell EMC UnityVSA Professional Edition with 2-node, 2-core, and Tie Breaker Node for 10, 25, and 50TB capacity offerings. The Dell EMC UnityVSA Tie Breaker Node or witness node is a lightweight third member of the cluster to arbitrate in the unlikely event all communication is lost between the two nodes to avoid data corruption. And don’t forget that you can always download and try Dell EMC UnityVSA Community Edition for free.

But there’s more!

Not directly associated with the OE 4.5 release, we’ve also invested in advancing the ability of Dell EMC Unity to participate in hybrid cloud environments – and it’s all available now.

Dell EMC UnityVSA Cloud Edition runs in AWS cloud

  • With our new Dell EMC Unity Cloud Edition, you’ll be able to deploy fully-functional Dell EMC Unity storage as a VM in a VMware Cloud environment with initial qualification for VMware Cloud on AWS. In this version, you’ll be able to deploy:
  • Comprehensive UFS64 file services for VM Cloud
  • Cloud-based DR capabilities with native asynchronous replication; and
  • Scalable test and development environments without additional Dell EMC Unity hardware.

Dell EMC Unity validated with VMware Cloud Foundation

Finally, we’re always enthusiastic when third parties seek us out to review our products. In this case, here’s a StorageReview paper on Dell EMC Unity that provides a 360 degree view of the innovation we deliver – management, performance, architecture and software. I encourage you to read the review – it’s compelling.

As always, thank you for your business.

About the Author: Sean Kinney

Sean Kinney is considered an expert in data storage and data protection having spent 20 years in the IT industry. Currently, he is the Senior Director for primary storage marketing at DELL EMC.