Dell EMC has announced that after little more than a year - or 419 days to be exact - since shipping, its Dell EMC Unity family of All-Flash and hybrid flash storage arrays has achieved $1 billion in cumulative bookings. This makes it one of the fastest-growing storage products in the company’s history.

The company explained that Dell EMC Unity delivers best-in-class All-Flash and hybrid storage performance and simplicity for the midrange with integrated support for block and file data. To this end, since May 2016, nearly 6 000 customers have selected Dell EMC Unity to address block and file storage workloads such as databases, file systems, server virtual machines and virtual desktop infrastructures.

Onwards and upwards

“In just over a year since it was introduced, customer adoption of Dell EMC Unity has picked up incredible momentum, becoming one of the fastest-growing storage array families in company history,” said Jeff Boudreau, President of Storage, Dell EMC. “Designed for All-Flash performance and cloud-like simplicity, Dell EMC Unity has taken the midrange storage segment by storm and is helping thousands of SMEs and enterprises modernise their data centers,” he continued.

According to Dell EMC’s blog on the development, as customers embark on their digital transformation journeys, they depend on midrange storage products that provide value, simplicity, and performance to power their demanding workloads and applications. Features alone are no longer sufficient. The blog further noted that customers request, and rightfully so demand, products that can deliver “both great technology and great value that are naturally intuitive to use and support,” with these emerging as prime considerations that matter to customers today.

Looking back and looking ahead

The milestone comes just months after Dell EMC World 2017 in Las Vegas, where the company, along with outlining its vision, introduced four new Dell EMC Unity All-Flash models – Dell EMC Unity 350F, 450F, 550F and 650F. These provide up to 500TB of effective storage capacity per single U, and the introduction of a highly dense 80-drive, 3U footprint.

All new Dell EMC Unity models available in July include a 4x larger file system with inline file compression, integrated Copy Data Management (iCDM) with snapshot mobility, introduction of Dynamic Pools offering simpler mapped RAID protection and support for external encryption key management via KMIP (Key Management Interoperability Protocol). Additionally, Dell EMC Unity features an 8x increase in density and 8x more effective file system capacity than its predecessor, as well as the ability to install in under 10 minutes, 33% faster than previous generations.

Proof of the pudding…

Notable customers that have recently embraced Dell EMC Unity storage arrays for their midrange and enterprise workloads include:

• North Carolina State University (NC State), which is the largest university in North Carolina and considers its storage infrastructure critical to supporting its growing population of more than 33 000 students. The public university faces the challenge of doing more with less and was therefore looking to effectively manage its large-scale environment with limited resources. With storage growth rates at 30% year-over-year, NC State required a modern data center solution that would enable consolidation of multiple legacy arrays into a smaller footprint. NC State selected Dell EMC Unity storage to leverage its compact size and data efficiency services such as inline file compression and simplified management. The university’s IT department relies on the performance of its Dell EMC Unity All-Flash arrays to support a wide range of applications used by administration, faculty and students, with each application having different performance and availability requirements. Dell EMC CloudIQ provides cloud-based storage analytics for NC State’s Dell EMC Unity environment, giving it a near real-time and long-term view of its data storage requirements to help the IT department stay ahead of demand for storage growth.

• Cambridge University Hospitals (CUH) in Cambridge, England recently deployed a Dell EMC Unity All-Flash storage system to support its InterSystems HealthShare informatics platform to consolidate localised data about 3.2 million patients into a single data warehouse. Dell EMC Unity supports the HealthShare platform and its powerful analytics tools that enable CUH to effectively and efficiently mine almost every type of data found in a hospital environment including structured and unstructured data, images, documents and messages from clinical, administrative and patient sources. With Dell EMC Unity All-Flash storage as its big data repository, CUH is realising dramatic gains in complex query response times that now resolve in minutes and seconds instead of hours. The deployment has also resulted in a reduction of data center floor space and a 60% reduction in power consumption at CUH based on the replacement of two full racks of legacy storage with less than one rack containing Dell EMC Unity.

Dell EMC Unity’s success may be the latest milestone, but it is certainly not the only one in recent history, with the most significant development in the past year being the merger between Dell and EMC.