Enterprises today are seeking powerful, next-generation unstructured data applications in areas such as data analytics, artificial intelligence and electronic design automation (EDA) to accelerate their business outcomes.
To run these workloads, organizations require extreme performance, but are mostly constrained in terms of budget and need reduced IT operating costs. In order to help organizations address this explosive growth of unstructured data, unlock their data capital cost-effectively and enable digital transformation, Dell EMC launched new Isilon and ClarityNow solutions.
Dell EMC Isilon F810 all-flash scale-out NAS provides extreme performance and efficiency to support demanding unstructured data workloads while significantly lowering the effective cost of all-flash storage solutions. And Dell EMC ClarityNow data management software enables businesses to locate, access and manage data quickly, no matter where it resides – across file and object storage, in the data center and in the cloud – and thereby accelerate business outcomes.
Read as we interview Sri Seshadri, Consultant Product Manager at Dell EMC to know more about these solutions.
1. Studies show that 80% of the data today is unstructured, and it is growing both in volume and variety. What are the main data management challenges organizations face in such a scenario?
In an environment where many IT budgets are tightly controlled, organizations with traditional IT infrastructure are increasingly challenged to keep pace with rapidly increasing data storage requirements and growing management complexity. Traditional IT environments typically have a heterogeneous storage infrastructure often with dedicated infrastructure for specific applications and workloads.
With rapid data growth, these growing “silos” of storage can sometimes be highly inefficient with poor storage utilization while some may have over capacity “hot spots” that are unable to meet required performance SLAs. With these operational challenges, the rapid growth of unstructured data represents a significant opportunity for businesses – in an increasingly digital world, unstructured data is becoming for many organizations, an enormously valuable asset – something we refer to as “data capital” – that can enable them to gain new insight, identify new opportunities and accelerate their business.
2. How can organizations tackle these challenges and unlock the power of unstructured data?
To increase efficiency, simplify management, and unlock the value of this “data capital”, organizations need a modern data storage infrastructure that can enable a digital transformation of their business and accelerate business outcomes. To achieve this, organizations can begin by consolidating their unstructured data onto a single storage infrastructure that can support a wide range of applications and workloads with varying performance requirements.
This will enable organizations to eliminate costly, inefficient storage silos and greatly simplify management. This approach also enables organizations to create a “data lake” that can be used for data analytics and business intelligence initiatives. Dell EMC Isilon scale-out NAS is an ideal choice for this type of infrastructure. Isilon storage solutions scale easily – from 10s of terabytes to 10s of petabytes – to easily keep pace with rapid data growth while remaining simple to manage no matter how large the data environment becomes.
With 80% storage utilization and a highly dense architecture that reduces the storage footprint in the data center, Isilon storage efficiency can help organizations dramatically lower costs. To meet varying performance requirements, Isilon offers All-Flash, Hybrid and Archive platforms that can be combined into a single cluster with automated storage tiering and simple cloud storage integration to further optimize storage resources. Isilon’s extensive multiprotocol capabilities allow organizations to consolidate data and support a wide range of workloads – including powerful data analytics technologies – on a single storage platform that can help organizations unlock the value of data capital.
3. Dell EMC recently announced a new addition to Isilon All-Flash storage system. Please tell us about this solution and the new Dell EMC Isilon F810.
The Isilon F810 combines the extreme performance of all-flash with all of the advantages of the #1 scale-out NAS platform and a new, inline data compression capability that expands effective storage capacity and density to enable customers to achieve new levels of efficiency while lowering costs. Isilon F810 expands effective storage capacity and density with a data compression ratio of up to 3:1 depending on the workloads.
With the high-speed hardware-based inline data compression, the Isilon F810 provides up to 3 times more effective storage capacity than the existing Isilon F800 all-flash platform and up to 33% more effective storage capacity per raw TB than major competitive all-flash offerings.
With an effective storage capacity of up to 2.2 PB per 4U chassis and up to 79.6 PB in a 144 node cluster, the Isilon F810 provides a highly dense storage solution that reduces datacenter footprint and related costs including floor space, power and cooling. Isilon F810 all-flash scale-out NAS is ideal for demanding unstructured data workloads including EDA, data analytics and artificial intelligence.
4. How does Isilon F810 guarantee satisfaction and investment protection for future technology changes?
In keeping with the longstanding Dell EMC commitment to providing future-proof Isilon storage solutions, the new Isilon F810 storage platform integrates easily into existing Isilon clusters without disruption and without the need to perform manual data migration. This is another example of how organizations can continue to rely on Isilon innovation for their future unstructured data storage needs.
The Isilon cluster scales easily in minutes with the addition of the F810 and keeps storage and data management simple, no matter how large the data environment becomes.
5. Can you please tell us more about Dell EMC Future-Proof Loyalty Program?
All Isilon storage systems are covered under the Dell EMC Future-Proof Loyalty Program, giving customers additional peace of mind with guaranteed satisfaction for three years and investment protection for future technology changes.
Included in the program benefits, Dell EMC guarantees that for any new purchase of an Isilon F810, for a period of one year from the date of delivery, the Isilon F810 will provide logical usable capacity, including all data, equivalent to at least two times (2x) the usable physical capacity.
6. Along with Isilon F810, the company also released the new Dell EMC ClarityNow software. What’s the role of the new software in data management?
Dell EMC ClarityNow software enables organizations to locate, access and manage data in seconds, no matter where it resides – across file and object storage, in the data center and in the cloud. ClarityNow data management software manages file-based workloads and is a highly complementary solution to Dell EMC Isilon and ECS, enabling a unified global file system view across heterogeneous distributed storage and the cloud.
The software allows IT to gain better insights into enterprise file data usage and storage capacity, while also empowering end users and content owners with self-service capabilities to find, use and move files anywhere within the unified global file system. These powerful features can help unlock the value of data capital and accelerate business outcomes by offering flexibility for users to index and gain visibility into billions of files and folders that would otherwise be trapped in storage silos based on their physical location.
Also read: Dell EMC Unity Midrange Storage advances data reduction, data protection, and management in latest OS update
7. Wrapping up, what are the 3 main benefits of these new solutions along with tackling data management challenges?
- Dell EMC Isilon F810 all-flash scale-out NAS provides extreme performance and efficiency to support demanding unstructured data workloads while significantly lowering the effective cost of all-flash storage solutions.
- Dell EMC ClarityNow data management software enables businesses to locate, access and manage data quickly, no matter where it resides – across file and object storage, in the data center and in the cloud – and thereby accelerate business outcomes.
Both of these new powerful Dell EMC offerings are designed to help organizations modernize their IT infrastructure, gain new levels of efficiency and unlock the value of data capital
