#DellTechWorld 2019 Hardware Announcements, Unity XT, Isilon, PowerProtect, PowerSwitch, VxRail ACE and much more

Wow, yesterday was a big day at Dell Technologies World. Following on from the VMware and Dell Technologies announcements of day 1, today focused on the Dell EMC products as well as new Dell client devices. 

On stage were Jeff Clarke and John Roese announcing a wrath of enterprise and client technologies. I will attempt to summarise the key areas from these below. I have also created a video with a high-level summary below.

Dell EMC Unity XT - Now utilising the latest generation of Intel CPU, this mid-market device is now offering twice the performance of previous arrays and 5:1 inline data optimisation, all while still be simple to manage and taking only approx 15 minutes to configure. 

Dell Isilon continues to be the leader in scale-out NAS storage, and the latest editions of the firmware are now able to cope with 252 units in a single cluster delivering 58PB of data. Speaking to the Dell execs, there are growing demands for this scale of storage particularly where autonomous vehicles are concerned and other similar data-intensive workloads. 

Dell have been working for some time now on modernising their Data Protection offerings, launched at the show was the Dell Power Protect brand, initially with a scale out and scale up application the X400. The X400 is available in both hybrid and also all-flash configurations starting at 64TB. The Power Protect software which is also available standalone is simple to use and aims to incorporate both data protection and management. Initial releases will only support VMware, SQL, File, Oracle and Linux Systems but the demonstration of a job configuring the backup of a complete virtual infrastructure only took a minute and was very simple. I look forward to learning more about this product. 

Next up is the IDPA (Integrated Data Protection Appliances) the DPA4400 is now available in an 8-24TB configuration for small businesses and ROBO sites, this appliance is utilising the data domain and Avamar technology that came from EMX.  

There is a big focus in the industry at the moment to ensure organisations can deliver and scale AI workloads. Dell today announced the DSS8440 server, a 4RU, 2 Socket server but it also can host up to 10 NVIDIA v100 GPUs, ideal for these type of workloads. 

Finally of the announcements I will be briefing in this blog post I was pleased to see the release of a public preview for the VxRail Analytical engines ACE (Analytical Consulting Engine) this aims to give VxRail admins analytical information to ensure the performance and stability of their VxRail platform is maintained as well as providing pro-active scaling information around future storage and performance bottlenecks. 

I will be doing follow up blog posts looking in more depth about these technologies and also the new client range of devices. In the meantime, my doodle from yesterday can be seen below.  

If you would like to discuss any of these announcements, please feel free to reach out.