Software Innovation Drives Your Unity XT Hybrid Flash Arrays

By Shannon Champion, Vice President of Product Marketing - Primary Storage, HCI, and CI, Dell Technologies 

June 14^th, 2022 -  Dell Technologies continues delivering breakthrough storage software innovations to its customers with the availability of Dell Unity XT’s latest Operating Environment (OE) 5.2. This software release delivers several important storage technologies designed to simplify how users address capacity expansion and recover data faster, expand disaster recovery topologies, increase storage utilization and cost-effectively upgrade Unity XT systems while lowering CapEx/OpEx.

Just as important, the 5.2 release brings feature/function parity across the family of Unity XT Hybrid Flash and All-Flash arrays. The new features, which also apply in part to Unity XT AFAs, target the continuing market relevancy for HFAs as a compelling storage solution for small to mid-size enterprises (SME) with general purpose workloads that don’t need the speed and low latency of All Flash/NVMe architectures. With Unity XT HFAs, these workloads greatly benefit from how Unity XT balances the performance of flash with the cost effectiveness of disk without compromising availability, affordability or features – including multi-cloud interoperability. For the right workloads, Unity XT HFAs offer practical and economic advantages relative to (and sometimes in conjunction with) AFAs.

The OE 5.2 release will have an immediate impact on 80,000+¹ Dell Unity and Unity XT installed systems worldwide, with significant software enhancements enabling users to:

• • Perform online data-in-place controller upgrades² when more performance, capacity and system limits are required ensuring their initial investment is protected
  • Support for new synchronous file replication configurations with fan-out and cascading topologies enhancing disaster recovery operations for the business
  • Deliver additional system efficiencies with dynamic pool and inline data reduction software for both hybrid and all flash pools on Unity XT HFAs.

Hybrid Flash Arrays remain a compelling storage solution for many enterprises. It’s why IT managers with a good understanding of their latency requirements can deploy lower-cost solutions such as Unity XT HFAs to meet the needs of general-purpose workloads that run their organization. Through effective workload evaluation, businesses can potentially lower their storage infrastructure costs significantly without compromising performance, availability and features while benefitting from a markedly more aggressive total cost of ownership (TCO) profile.

“In a relatively short time using Dell Unity XT storage, we’ve seen a 25% increase in the Hybrid Flash Array performance based on the workloads we run in comparison to the previous generation of Dell Unity x50 models,” according to Jeremy Meeler, Systems Programmer/Specialist, North Carolina State University.

According to IDC, the HFA market is projected to grow 5.1% CAGR through 2025 due to economics, flexibility and management familiarity as key reasons customers are still buying HFAs. Unity XT 5.2 is well positioned to take advantage of this growth and presents a clear choice for global customers and channel partners in search of an all-inclusive hybrid flash array solution.

Additionally, Unity XT HFA customers have access to the broad functionality within the Dell storage ecosystem including AppSync for integrated copy data management, Connectrix for enterprise network performance, PowerPath to enable intelligent multi-pathing, CloudIQ with predictive storage analytics, metro node appliance that enables synchronous replication over metro distances, Storage Automation & DevOps Resources for integrating workload automation flow and many more.

Unity XT customers also benefit from Dell Technologies Services to help overcome obstacles and navigate their digital transformations. By identifying goals, measuring progress, streamlining costs and accelerating innovation, Dell Technologies Services helps customers discover true organizational agility.

What’s most important for Dell, is to consistently enable customers with leading-edge software capabilities that provide greater agility enabling a seamless digital transformation process and remain competitive. Dell Unity XT has certainly lived up to this mission since inception, with world-class software innovation helping customers confidently meet and exceed their expected outcomes.

Unity XT OE 5.2 is available now for existing customers to download. With valid configurations starting as low as $10,000, customers can begin ordering new Unity XT HFA systems with OE 5.2 today.