- The first day of EMC's annual EMC World conference has seen the launch of Unity, a new line of all-flash and hybrid (mixed flash/disk) storage arrays aimed at SMBs. EMC, the biggest player in the all-flash array market, promises “cloud-like simplicity” and 3x the performance of its mid-range VNX arrays, and will allow Unity’s storage and management features to be deployed as a virtual (software-based) appliance running on third-party hardware.
- Unity complements three existing EMC flash offerings: XtremIO (meant for mainstream enterprise applications), VMAX All Flash (uses EMC’s traditional VMAX high-end storage architecture), and the recently-launched DSSD D5 (meant for high-performance workloads, and unlike VMAX, built from the ground up to support flash). Pure Storage (PSTG), which in March launched an array (the FlashArray//m10) meant for SMBs, is among the companies EMC is targeting. As is Nimble Storage (NMBL), which has long been selling hybrid arrays to the SMB market and recently entered the all-flash market. Nimble fell 1.9% today.
- Also announced by EMC: New cloud storage services from EMC’s Virtustream unit that promise high performance, enterprise-class reliability, and integration with on-premise EMC storage hardware and backup software. The services compete with Amazon’s S3, Microsoft’s Azure Storage, and other cloud storage offerings, and further EMC's efforts to offset the impact of cloud adoption on on-premise storage sales.
- Other launches include a cloud-based dashboard (called MyService360) for monitoring the health of an EMC data center environment, new software for content management, archiving, and data copy management, and an update to EMC’s ViPR controller software for managing EMC and non-EMC hardware and services.
- Separately, EMC and Dell have announced Dell Technologies will be name of the company formed by their pending merger (due to close by October). Enterprise IT products will be sold under the Dell EMC brand, and PCs under the Dell brand.