Dell EMC Unity

Predecessors

Clariion’s predecessor, HADA (High Availability Disk Array) was developed in 1991 by Data General Corporation, one of the first minicomputer companies. HADA was designed to significantly improve the performance of commodity hard disk drives by running large numbers of them in parallel. It was one of the first products on the market with a cached RAID system, and featured hot-swapping and several other innovations.^[1][2]

HADA was initially sold exclusively as an array with the company's Aviion line of computer systems as the HADA (High Availability Disk Array) and later the HADA II before being made available for broader open systems attachment and renamed CLARiiON in 1994.^[3] Fibre Channel support was added in 1997.^{[citation needed]}

As CLARiiON sales grew, Data General created a separate CLARiiON division^[4] and began selling the product both direct to Aviion and Data General MV customers, but also as an OEM offering to its systems competitors, including Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard and Silicon Graphics.^[5] CLARiiON was considered the primary value generator in EMC Corporation’s decision to purchase Data General in 1999.^[6]

Development of the CLARiiON product line continued under EMC. The company introduced IP-based storage access in 2000.^[7] In 2001, Dell and EMC entered into a partnership, and the CLARiiON line began being resold by Dell.^[8] In 2002, the CX200, CX400 and CX600 entry-level lines were introduced, the result of the year-long collaboration between the two companies.^[9] In 2003, CLARiiON became the industry's first NEBS-certified storage system.^[10]

Subsequent processor and bandwidth upgrades led to a new CX lineup (CX300, CX500, CX700) and a low-end, SATA-based CLARiiON array, the AX100 (now updated to AX150).

In May 2006, EMC introduced the third generation of CLARiiON, named CX3 UltraScale. The lineup, consisting of the CX and CX3-80, was the industry's only storage platform to leverage end-to-end 4 Gbit/s (4 billion bits per second) Fibre Channel and PCI-Express technologies.^{[citation needed]} Later in 2007, the line was expanded to include a new entry-level storage system, the CX3-10.^[11]

Development continued until 2011, when EMC introduced the new VNX series of unified storage disk arrays intended to combine and replace both CLARiiON and Celerra products. The new suite of VNX SAN/NAS arrays included three product lines: an entry-level VNXe, the VNX5000 series and the VNX7000 series. The new VNX line was marketed as the only storage system offering automated file and block sub-LUN tiering using its FAST technology.^[12]

In early 2012, with development continuing on the VNX lines, both CLARiiON and Celerra were discontinued. Development efforts in 2012 and 2013 included a strong focus on supporting data warehousing applications and multicore architectures, culminating in MCx, billed by some as the second generation of VNX. The massive hyperthreading enabled by multicore architectural support led to significant improvements in caching, file IOPS and database transaction rates.^[13] In 2014, MCx support was added to the VNXe line.^[14]

Release

Dell EMC Unity was introduced in 2016. The new platform virtualized the “data mover” NAS functionality originally developed for the Celerra product line and moved it into software, simplifying hardware setup and enabling file system upgrades.^[15] The transition from VNX to Unity was described by Dell EMC insider as replacing an entire car part-by-part in the middle of a race, without pit stops. The improvements outlined in Chad Sacak’s blog post included a 3x performance boost, reduction from a 7U to a 2U form factor, almost 50% power consumption reduction and significantly faster rack installation.^[16]

Dell EMC Unity’s new transactional file system supported traditional NAS use cases while better supporting transactional file applications. It included Fibre Channel, FCoE, NFS, SMB 3.0 (CIFS), and iSCSI protocols. All flash and hybrid Dell EMC Unity models were introduced in 2016, as were a new HTML5 user interface and, later that year, inline compression with inline data deduplication scheduled for later in 2017.^[17]

In May 2017, Dell EMC Unity was updated to support many new features and capabilities including Dynamic Pools. This is a new Pool type introduced in Dell Unity OE version 4.2.x allowing users to flexibly add 1 or more drives at a time. This helps reduce drive rebuild times and flash wear when compared to the use of Traditional Pools. A Dynamic Pool is created by default when creating a Pool in Unisphere with Dell EMC Unity OE version 4.2.x and later. Dynamic Pools are only supported on Dell EMC Unity All Flash Systems. Additionally with the May release, support for a 256 TB file system and compression for file, block archiving to the cloud, thin clones with snapshots and AppSync integration for integrated Copy Data Management (iCDM), and Data-At-Rest-Encryption (D@RE) External Key Manager were all included.^[18]

In June, 2017, roughly 10 months after the Dell EMC Merger finalized, Dell Technologies announced that cumulative bookings (sales and anticipated sales) of Dell EMC Unity All-flash and hybrid flash storage had surpassed US$1 billion.^[19]