Today, Dell Technologies is making a significant number of storage-related announcements. They detailed significant private cloud infrastructure advancements to help customers manage both traditional and modern workloads with greater speed, efficiency and security. On the product front, Dell unveiled new PowerStore and PowerMax QLC models, featuring AI-driven automation and strengthened security. Dell also extended their partnership with Nutanix Cloud Platform to provide offer greater flexibility, performance and simplified IT operations. A Dell PowerFlex Ultra release achieves up to 80% storage efficiency, 10x9s data availability and reduced costs, while Dell PowerProtect innovations provide robust cyber resilience with advanced security, centralized management and scalable solutions for modern workloads.
“As organizations are going through massive, massive change with AI, as well as other, other modernization initiatives, we are seeing a few common trends,” said Varun Chhabra, Senior Vice President of ISG Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. “There is a need to really support a diverse set of workloads. Modern businesses have a variety of workloads, from legacy systems to cutting-edge applications that they’re building out at the edge, or using AI in the data centre. These span on-premises environments as well as cloud environments, and increasingly require a flexible approach. Doing so in a consistent way is more important to customers than ever. We are also finding that disaggregated infrastructure is a new modality that is really allowing customers to deploy resources strategically and efficiently. and be ready for not just the needs of today, but also for the future. They don’t want the silos of the past. They’re looking for consistency, simplification, automation, and integration when it comes to simplifying their IT operations — and in the most secure manner possible.”
Chhabra laid out what Dell is doing here.
“There is a growing awareness that AI is really grounded in data, and if your data is not secure, increasingly, your business’s operations are more difficult and more at threat than ever before. All of this is driving towards a need to really build a different kind of infrastructure. Legacy three-tier architecture and HCI-based architecture are no longer sufficient for what customers need to do. to really move forward in this world of AI. At Dell Technologies, we firmly believe that there is a better way.”
Chhabra pointed to a Dell Technologies curated solution, with the Dell Private Cloud supported by the Dell Automation Platform.
“These are foundational to our approach to helping organizations build a smarter private cloud,” he said. “At the heart of all of this is really the software-driven automation capabilities that the Dell Automation Platform provides.
Earlier this year, you saw us make some announcements around what we’re doing with the Dell Automation Platform and Dell Private Cloud. And these are foundational to our approach to helping organizations build a smarter private cloud. At the heart of all of this is really the software-driven automation capabilities that the Dell Automation Platform provides. Its major components include a unified portal where customers can access applications and different, ISV- specific solutions, as well as an orchestrator capability that allows for simplified deployment. This allows customers to deploy infrastructure with a secure, zero-touch onboarding approach that allows customers to be able to tailor their technology needs, specifically to the workload that they’re looking for.
“Whether it’s building private clouds, deploying AI solutions in the enterprise faster than ever before, working on building workloads and applications out of the far edge or in a distributed cloud environment, as well as the flexibility to build their own workloads as they need to, makes the automation platform really foundational as a software layer to build that software-based automation, consistency, management, and AIOps capabilities for all of these workloads in a disaggregated force world,” Chabbra said.
The Dell Private Cloud is built for this disaggregated infrastructure-first world, and provides investment protection.
“Through its open infrastructure approach, that allows organizations to deploy a specific private cloud operating system or hypervisor solution as they choose, and then later to be able to actually re-image the hardware and deploy a completely different hypervisor solution if they so choose to,” Chabbra stated. “All they need to do is bring their own license for a new hypervisor or a cloud solution, private cloud solution. And all of this is done through an easy-to-use, simple appliance-like experience that provides customers with adaptability.
What all this means is the customer can invest from an infrastructure standpoint for both the hardware and the software. They can support whatever they have today, but then in the future, they have the peace of mind that they will be able to adjust and change direction if they decide to do so. In 2.5 hours, you can deploy a private cloud in under 2.5 hours, with zero manual effort, and a high degree of automation.
The second curated solution is the Dell Native Edge approach. Dell Native Edge is not new, but it has the same underpinnings and the same software-based automation platform that the Dell Private Cloud uses.
“Dell Native Edge is a full-stack solution that’s specifically built for edge and distributed environments,” Chhabra stated. “It’s fully integrated into the Dell Automation Platform, and allows for customers to be able to deploy workloads, including AI workloads, out of the far edge or in distributed clusters for environments such as distribution centers, retail locations, manufacturing centers. Customers now have the same approach for their data centre-based workloads, as well as their far-edge and distributed cloud workloads. Customers found over 60%, or up to 62%, time savings.
And we’re seeing tremendous amount of customer momentum for both the Dell Private Cloud as well as Dell Native Edge.
Chabbra then turned to storage, starting with the all-flash Dell PowerStore, an all-flash array which has delivered 6 quarters of growth, with 5 of those being in double digits.
“We’ve seen a tremendous amount of momentum, not just with mid-range buyers, but also with enterprise buyers, including our higher-end models, thanks to the elite performance that PowerStore is able to provide,” he said. “That’s why our release this week really focuses on the high end of performance requirements with a brand new QLC-based 5200Q model. This is a cost-optimized design delivering up to 60% more IOPS than the 3200Q model. It matches the performance envelope of the 5200T, which is a TLC-based platform, at a significantly lower price point.”
In addition, alongside the new hardware capability, the brand new software update for the PowerStore operating system is available as a free, non-disruptive upgrade to our customers. It has more security and resilience capabilities with support for single sign-on, and new replication capabilities over fiber channel.
“PowerStore OS management capabilities are getting smarter, too, with proactive anomaly detection that allows customers to get insight to, to any challenges, whether it’s with resource constraints that will impact workload performance, or identify cyber attacks sooner than ever before,” Chhabra noted. “We’re also very excited to announce in the PowerStore OS updates new AI-driven self-healing capabilities, which is powered by real-time telemetry from our global install base of more than 18,000 systems. With AI-driven self-healing, PowerStore can now detect issues automatically.”
Chabbra said this should help address customer challenges and problems up to 90% faster, so there is lots to be excited about on the PowerStore side.
“We’re also very excited to be strengthening our partnership with Nutanix to help customers deploy their private cloud environment with unmatched flexibility,: he indicated. “Building on our April launch of PowerFlex support for Nutanix Cloud Platform environments, we are announcing now that Dell Powerstore will also support Nutanix environments, uniting Dell’s flagship all-flash innovation with Nutanix’s modern cloud architecture. This collaboration allows customers to use either PowerFlex, or now PowerStore, to be able to power their Nutanix Cloud Platform environments in a disaggregated fashion, giving them the flexibility of disaggregated infrastructure. Customers will gain simplified management capabilities with PowerStore’s intelligent automation as well as the VM-centric operations of Nutanix’s Prism capabilities.
Chhabra then moved on from PowerStore to the software-defined PowerFlex.
“We’re very excited to announce the latest release of PowerFlex, which is PowerFlex Ultra,” he said. “With this next-generation PowerFlex release, we have reimagined the architecture of PowerFlex to prioritize efficiency and resilience. And we’re doing this through a new capability in the PowerFlex Ultra release, which is the Scalable Availability Engine, or the SAE.
“The SAE is a groundbreaking storage architecture that is designed to address the challenges of scaling large deployments, which is where PowerFlex really specializes,” Chhabra stated. “SAE eliminates the traditional trade-offs between efficiency, availability, and performance, and at its core is a unique distributed razor coding implementation, which is purpose-built for primary block storage. This means that customers will get the benefits of efficiency and availability, while still maintaining the same performance that they have come to expect and depend on for PowerFlex.
The SAE allows for improved data durability and reliability, up to 10 nines of data availability. The SAE also optimizes storage efficiency like never before. We believe that customers will see an up to 80% improvement in storage efficiency, or take advantage of 3x the effective capacity that they’re used to with PowerFlex. With advanced fault resilience and up to 8x more snapshots and clone, PowerFlex Ultra really keeps moving the envelope, or keeps moving the ball forward for PowerFlex.
And finally, on the storage side, Chhabra announced the latest release of the PowerMax OS, the PowerMax 2500, which was mentioned at Dell Technologies World earlier this year.
“This Data Domain, all flash appliance really redefines what customers can expect from cyber resilience solutions, and provides a strong foundation for customers to build their cyber resilience capabilities around,” Chabbra said. “It brings the incredible data efficiency and cyber resilience capabilities that Data Domain has always had, with incredible performance and recovery capabilities that come with the all-flash capabilities that we’re now making available to customers. The all-flash appliance enables up to 4x faster restores, up to 2.8x faster analytics in the Cyber Vault, and up to 2x faster replication. All of this means an ability to be able to recover from cyber attacks faster than ever before. It also takes up to 40% less rack space, with up to 80% less power consumed. And all of this comes with this industry-leading, never-matched 65 is to 1 data reduction capabilities that Data Domain has. This is an incredible, incredible high-end solution that,we believe will be very, very important for customers that are looking to have reduce their downtime disruption, when protecting themselves from cyber attacks.”
Moving from the high end of the Data Domain appliance portfolio to the entry level, Chabbra announced a brand new entry-level appliance, the Data Domain DD3410.
“This is really aimed at helping bring the same trust and security and efficiency that data domain is known for into smaller environments, such as remote sites, remote offices, branch offices, as well as remote locations,” he said. “This new appliance is a compact powerhouse. It’s really simple to deploy, it’s easy to manage, and it’s built to protect both traditional and modern workloads. The system delivers Data immutability and data integrity, and has support for a broad partner and software ecosystem. And it has flexible scalability, including 8TB scaling all the way up to 32 terabytes just in one 2U. Like all Data Domain solutions, this offer integrates natively with PowerStore and PowerMax to ensure fast, efficient, and secure backups directly from the software”
Finally, wrapping up the cyber resilience solutions is the new PowerProtect Data Manager appliance, a modern software-built solution for the next era of data protection. This appliance really represents the best way to achieve cyber resilience with PowerProtect. Customers get one single, easy-to-manage interface, ensuring a unified user experience with central management of data manager, a PowerProtect Data Manager, as well as PowerProtect Data Domain, all in one centralized location to deliver customized operations for them. This is really, really aimed at providing that end-to-end protection, all built in — anomaly detection, immutability, and enterprise-grade cyber resilience all in one, single, unified experience.
Chhabra emphasized the importance of all these announcements to channel partners.
“As with all of our solutions, these capabilities, whether it’s the Dell Automation Platform, the Dell Private Cloud, or Dell Native Edge, or the storage and cyber resilience enhancements, are all available for partners to take advantage of,” he explained. “Our channel partners will be able to take advantage of and build on, whether it is in terms of reselling some of these capabilities to customers, or, as is more often the case, to be able to build value-addon, value-added services and capabilities on top of these solutions to really deliver, curated outcomes and end-to-end solutions for customers. These solutions are really designed with the channel ecosystem and our partner ecosystem in mind. Whether it’s reselling, deployment capabilities, support capabilities, or delivering full solutions or services, or managed services capabilities on top of the infrastructure, all of this is really built to help channel partners be able to do that.”