EMC chases mid-range market with all-flash Unity storage 

The company has configured it VNX/VNXe arrays to come up with Unity which optimizes the use flash. The new unified block and file system supports VMware Virtual Volumes in order to integrate with virtual machines. Unity is EMC’s fourth all-flash storage system which includes XtremIO (priced from $80,000 to $90,000), and VMax All Flash and DSSD D5 which are aimed at large enterprises.

“Customers told us they wanted a lot more storage for less,” said Jeff Boudreau, senior vice-president of mid-range business at EMC. “Unity performs three times faster than current VNX/VNXe arrays at half the cost and takes up one-third the space.”

Unity’s all-flash variant, with prices starting at $18,000, delivers up to 300,000 input/output operations per second. While the unity price tag can go up to $150,000, XtremIO starts at $100,000 and goes into the millions.

The hybrid version of unity starts at under $10,000.

The virtual edition of Unity is available for free download.

Unity uses a new transactional file system making the appliance well suited for handling transactional file applications while running traditional network attached storage.

The team that developed VNXe also worked in Unity, according to Burton. However, while VNXe “taps out at the low end. Unity scales to 1,000 drives to three petabytes of flash – with the data services.”

Unity is designed as a volume product and while EMC can build a volume distribution channel the company sees Dell’s well-oiled distribution channel as contributing to the success of the new storage appliance.