Product taglines can provide more than a catchy slogan, and the description of Dell Technologies Inc.’s PowerStore offers additional insight into the tech giant’s evolving enterprise storage and AI strategies.
By providing a “smart choice for all-flash storage,” Dell is positioning PowerStore for AI innovation to leverage the efficiency and resilience that flash technology can deliver. It’s a tagline for an integrated storage offering that highlights three central pillars of the company’s approach: tech for AI, choice for customers and all-flash reliability.
“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,” said Travis Vigil, senior vice president of product management at Dell, during a recent interview with theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. “From our perspective, it’s a pivotal moment in IT, and customers are using this rise of generative AI to reevaluate their data strategy.”
This feature is part of News Media’s exploration of Dell’s market impact in enterprise AI and the storage industry. (* Disclosure below.)
Flexibility for enterprise storage
The company’s release of PowerStore Prime in May highlighted Dell’s interest in offering customers an array of choices in the deployment of enterprise storage. Easier-to-deploy software updates boosted native replication for block and file storage workloads in Windows, VMware and Linux.
The announcements were designed to provide flexibility to customers who are currently finding their way budgetarily and technologically through the evolving world of generative AI. Dell is building infrastructure for enterprise workloads, large and small, to meet the need for powering AI-driven initiatives.
“Customers realize that potentially a smaller purpose-built model trained on the right data is more beneficial to them than a larger model running in the public cloud,” said Ihab Tarazi, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Dell, in a conversation with theCUBE. “If you look at the Dell server and storage portfolio, we service customers of all sizes.”
Dell has focused on streamlining management and enhancing security through automated data storage solutions. These include SmartFabric Storage Software, or SFSS, which facilitates endpoint discovery, registration and event notification.
“We do have a very focused, better together strategy within our portfolio of data center products,” said Jodey Hogeland, global storage technologist at Dell, in an interview with theCUBE. “When you look at what’s happening with SmartFabric Storage Software … being able to really automate the process of deploying, zoning, bringing net new hosts into an environment … that can all be done seamlessly.”
Dell’s solution capitalizes on the speed and communication capabilities that all-flash storage technology can provide over traditional hard disk drives or HDDs. Faster data access and reduced latency are ways that all-flash contributes to significantly improved storage performance.
PowerStore Prime includes the latest release of Dell’s enterprise all-flash array. The company has published data for PowerStore Prime documenting up to 30% more input/output operations per second or IOPS, 20% lower latency, and double the volumes or addressable storage to the host.
Building a resilient storage platform
Resilience is a key part of the PowerStore Prime release. As IT organizations deal with the rising threat of AI-driven malware and ransomware attacks, Dell has focused on integrating simplified data protection and recovery processes. Dell’s solution involves an integration between PowerStore and PowerProtect Data Domain in a single management user interface. PowerStore data can be backed-up to any on-premises software-defined or PowerProtect Data Domain appliance, or in the cloud using APEX Protection Storage.
It’s a solution designed to address a threat landscape that has become more complicated with the reality of new AI tools in the hands of malicious actors, according to Drew Schulke, vice president of product management at Dell.
“Seventy-one percent of CIOs characterize AI threat levels as either very high or somewhat high within their organizations,” Schulke said in a recent conversation with 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.”
Replication, in which data is duplicated to a remote system, is another important element in storage resilience. Dell supports synchronous and asynchronous replication for PowerStore, minimizing the potential impact of a system failure or breach while simplifying recovery. Data can be replicated on-premises or in the cloud, through an integration with other Dell products.
Synchronous replication, introduced with the release of PowerStoreOS 4.0 in May, provides data consistency between the source and destination volumes during normal operation. Asynchronous replication writes data to the primary storage array first, and then can commit data to be replicated in memory or a disk-based journal. Dell’s replication approach is designed to provide data redundancy and safeguards against storage system failure. PowerStore’s replication rules provide a protection policy that minimizes downtime and meets disaster recovery needs.
“You start to look at the better together story we have within ISG with our data protection products fully integrated to our PowerProtect portfolio with what we call Storage Direct,” Schulke said. “The storage admin can set backup and restore policies to a Dell PowerProtect system, which could also be on-prem, it could be on a third site, or it could be in the public cloud. Incredible flexibility in terms of your ability to be resilient if something bad goes wrong.”
Leveraging AI for security and efficiency
Along with resilience, Dell has also attached generative AI capabilities to PowerStore. Dell’s APEX AIOps software-as-a-service optimizes Dell infrastructure health and service availability, providing real-time anomaly detection for the storage offering.
“With Dell Technologies APEX AIOps, we’ve fully built in and integrated a cybersecurity assessment capability,” Hogeland said. “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.’”
This integration of AI spotlights Dell’s focus on building efficiency into its storage portfolio. Whether it involves the use of automation to monitor threats or advanced data reduction technology in PowerStore to enhance efficiency, Dell’s value proposition is that it will help organizations avoid costly outages and enhance performance.
Data reduction is an area where Dell has developed approaches designed to help customers save expense. PowerStore’s Intelligent Deduplication and Compression are part of its formula for a 5:1 data reduction guarantee. If a customer fails to receive 5:1 results during a pre-paid maintenance term, Dell has said it will ship new drives at no cost. By centralizing a number of key enterprise functions within PowerStore, Dell’s customers are using storage deployments as a way to generate efficiency and control costs as workload demands increase.
“One of the nice things about PowerStore is … supporting all those workloads in one place,” said Jonathan Kowall, director of specialist solutions engineers at AHEAD, during a recent 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 how to manage and maintain this.”
Dell’s announcement of PowerStore Prime in May has been described by the company’s own executives as the most substantial release of the storage solution in four years. Its latest iteration has demonstrated the company’s interest in providing an intelligent and adaptable data storage platform through an integration of networking with compute and storage. This is a key element in Dell’s strategic approach to enterprise AI and it will be one worth watching as the company rolls out additional enhancements for PowerStore in 2025.
“What we bet on is that networking needs to be integrated with compute and storage and be very high throughput,” said Dell’s Vigil. “The networking strategy we picked to get high-performance switches with significant throughput and fully integrate the stack with compute is exactly what AI needs.”
Check out News and theCUBE’s full coverage of the Smarter Storage for Tomorrow’s Opportunities event:
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.)
Image: News/Microsoft Designer
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