Smarter storage: Enhance performance and AI integration – News

With its latest enhancements for PowerStore, Dell Technologies Inc. has been focused on smarter storage and integrating the IT stack, with a product portfolio that addresses enterprise needs for performance, efficiency, resiliency and multicloud data mobility.

At the center of the Dell conversation has been AI and its impact on IT infrastructure design.  As AI becomes more prevalent, Dell is architecting its storage offerings for this new reality.

This was one of the clear messages to emerge from the Smarter Storage for Tomorrow’s Opportunities event, hosted by theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio, in October. Key Dell executives and partners discussed how customers are reevaluating their IT needs and what this means for the future direction of compute and storage. (* Disclosure below.)

“We’re starting to see that reevaluation lead to changing purchasing behavior based on our conversations with customers and the surveys we’ve done,” said Travis Vigil, senior vice president of product management at Dell, during his interview as part of the event. “Eighty-one percent of IT leaders believe AI is going to transform their industry and infrastructure and, at the same time, 84% of company critical data remains on-premises.”

Here are three key Smarter Storage insights you might have missed during the event:

1. AI adoption continues to have a significant impact on the smarter storage industry.

The push toward AI deployment throughout the enterprise has led Dell to develop new offerings in its storage portfolio that enable AI. These include the latest enhancements to the PowerStore platform that emphasize simplicity and adaptability for deployment of AI workloads on-premises.

“Customers are really looking for a solution that allows them to utilize storage for generative AI and provide them flexibility and choice for their private cloud,” Vigil said. “From our perspective, it’s a pivotal moment in IT, and customers are using this rise of generative AI to reevaluate their data strategy.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Travis Vigil, who was joined by Edward Pullin, director of IP marketing for Intel Accelerators at Intel Corp., and Jonathan Kowall, director of specialist solutions engineers at AHEAD:

The integration of AI into storage systems has been facilitated through the use of predictive capabilities. Dell is using AI to proactively identify and address issues, monitor arrays and enhance the efficiency of storage management.

“When you think about pinpointing issues across the stack within the storage array, a lot of that happens without the customer knowing about what’s happening, and Dell can mitigate some of those challenges before they do occur,” said Raphael Meyerowitz, vice president and partner of go-to-market at Presidio Inc., during a conversation on theCUBE. “The other piece is predicting and preventing some of those issues from occurring in real time. That’s AI under the covers with Dell. And then when you put it together, there’s no AI without data.”

There is also no AI without a processor platform to handle the data. Dell has partnered with Intel Corp. to leverage Xeon processors in its PowerStore platform to generate enhanced performance and greater efficiency.

“We can get about 20 gigabytes per second of compression performance, about 40 gigabytes per second of decompression performance,” said Pullin, in his appearance during the event. “We can go down to Level Nine compression for that data footprint efficiency. That’s what the accelerator is about.”

2. Security is becoming more integrated into storage offerings.

Accompanying the release of PowerStore Prime in May was APEX AIOps, software-as-a-service designed to optimize Dell infrastructure. Real-time anomaly detection is powered by AIOps in PowerStore, helping customers identify and mitigate potential threats.

“With Dell Technologies APEX AIOps, we’ve fully built in and integrated a cybersecurity assessment capability,” said Jodey Hogeland (pictured, right), global storage technologist at Dell, in an appearance during the event. “We’re skimming the NIST.gov database for known CVEs, exploits, and saying, ‘Hey, we just detected that there’s a known exploit that is open out there in your environment. Here’s how you fix it. Here’s what you need to do to service that and get rid of that.’”

One of the primary factors driving the integration of security features into storage is AI adoption. This has led to a focus by Dell and other vendors in this arena on resilience to protect the increasingly larger datasets that AI requires.

“Seventy-one percent of CIOs characterize AI threat levels as either very high or somewhat high within their organizations,” said Drew Schulke, vice president of product management at Dell, during an interview on theCUBE. “We need to be conscious of that aspect of AI as well. Given all those unknowns of storage needs and the evolving threat landscape, it’s important to make sure we have future-proof systems. And that applies to resiliency as much as any other aspect of the platform.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Drew Schulke, who was joined by Raphael Meyerowitz:

3. Customers are interested in storage solutions that are adaptable and efficient inside the modern infrastructure.

Dell’s enhancements for PowerStore support highly demanding workloads with software-driven performance boosts and increased hardware throughput. This has proved attractive to users who want to run a variety of applications on the platform efficiently.

“One of the nice things about PowerStore is … it’s supporting all those workloads in one place,” said Kowall, during an interview with theCUBE. “I can run virtualization, I can run containers, and I can start performing AI with one system. That’s efficiency just in man hours and in how to manage and maintain this.”

Adaptability in the modern infrastructure is at a premium as well. Shifting storage needs can often lead to costly and disruptive upgrades, and Dell has focused on enabling PowerStore to offer as much flexibility to its enterprise customers as possible.

“I would say what our customers are looking for is to not be boxed in,” explained John Lochausen (left), technical solutions architect at World Wide Technology Inc., in conversation with theCUBE. “Maybe I start with use case A today. I buy a platform that supports that use case. Down the road, something else comes up, I’d like to be able to use my existing investment to continue to service more stuff. If I outgrow the performance capabilities of my system, I want to be able to upgrade that, preferably, in place so that I’m not having to pick everything up and go through a months-long migration to move it with outage windows and all the pain that comes with that.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with John Lochausen, who was joined by Jodey Hogeland:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of the Smarter Storage for Tomorrow’s Opportunities, here’s our complete event video playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Smarter Storage for Tomorrow’s Opportunities event. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.)

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