I was talking by the water cooler today – really, there is an ice and filtered water machine at the end of the hall where some of the best storage conversations happen – with Brian Whitaker, a Product Group colleague and former product manager for Dell/EMC, about some of the cool things that Dell and EMC are doing around storage innovation. This is the first installment on things he educated me about. Part 2 is coming soon, once I figure out what some of my garbled notes mean.
Back in May, EMC announced a collection of enhancements to their CLARiiON and Celerra mid-range storage lineup, and now those enhancements have launched, both from EMC and from Dell.
On the Dell/EMC CX4 and NS product families, these enhancements are aimed at driving simplicity and efficiency. Do they align to your needs? Let’s take a look.
If you’re a storage admin, you know that EMC management is immensely versatile and tune-able, but hasn’t always been known for simplicity. That’s all changed with the release of Unisphere. Now you can take advantage of a task-based, graphical, streamlined UI that raises the bar for storage management. Not only is it simple, not only is it powerful, but for the first time it unifies file and block management on Celerra. That’s right. File and block – one console. That was a high hurdle to jump, and EMC’s done it.
And to make matters more interesting, it can access and manage arrays all the way back to Flare 19. So you can get the benefits of Unisphere without Flare updates on CX and CX3 generations. Just remember that Unisphere itself needs to run on a system with Flare 30 or greater.
Lastly, I am happy to bring to your attention that Unisphere comes with Flare 30 and DART 6.0 – as in not a chargeable item. Thus, currently shipping CX4 and NS arrays get Unisphere…for free!
Not bad so far, as it’s hard to argue with anything meant to improve ease of use, but it gets better. In the next post we’ll talk about FAST (Fully-Automated Storage Tiering), Fast Cache, and LUN Compression. These technologies can help drive efficiency in compelling ways. All in all, I think you’ll be pleased to see that innovation remains a key part of the Dell/EMC lineup.