Scaling smarter: Dell’s Jodey Hogeland on AI-driven storage – News

The rise of artificial intelligence is accelerating the pace of change in IT, introducing new levels of complexity that challenge even the most advanced enterprises. As infrastructure demands grow, the need for AI-driven storage solutions has never been greater.

Dell Technologies Inc. is addressing these challenges with its PowerStore platform, designed to simplify storage management while meeting the evolving needs of AI-driven workloads. Jodey Hogeland (pictured), PowerStore global evangelist at Dell, provided insights into how AI-powered automation is reshaping data storage, enabling systems that are more scalable, secure and adaptable to modern enterprises’ demands, during a recent interview with theCUBE Research’s Rob Strechay.

“I would say what our customers are looking for is to not be boxed in,” Hogeland said, during Dell’s Smarter Storage for Tomorrow’s Opportunities event. “Maybe I start with use case ‘A’ today. I buy a platform that supports that use case. Down the road, [if] 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.”

Hogeland brings nearly two decades of enterprise storage experience, spanning engineering, pre-sales leadership and strategic evangelism. Before his current role as PowerStore’s global evangelist, he was the global chief technical officer for Dell’s Modern Data Center Team, collaborating across sales, product management and engineering to align product strategy with customer needs. Previously, he held leadership and technical roles at Dell EMC and NetApp Inc., specializing in all-flash storage solutions such as XtremIO and VMAX All Flash. His deep technical expertise and ability to simplify complex storage concepts have made him a sought-after industry speaker and trusted advisor.

This feature is part of News Media’s ongoing series exploring the latest developments in the data storage and AI market. (* Disclosure below.) 

Navigating the speed of change in IT

As AI accelerates innovation, IT teams struggle to balance infrastructure demands while managing increasing complexity. This rapid evolution is forcing organizations to rethink their strategies and adopt AI-driven storage solutions that simplify operations, according to Hogeland.

“I think when you look at what’s happening inside of the industry with the speed of change and how fast things are changing, AI is driving our architectures [and] customers to adopt things at a pace,” he said. “I think it’s just strictly unparalleled. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen. That speed of change is driving a lot of complexity.”

This complexity is reshaping IT roles, forcing professionals to manage storage, compute and networking simultaneously. Adaptability is becoming a critical skill as responsibilities expand, according to Hogeland.

“For example, today, you’ve got men and women that are working in the landscape,” he said. “They’re the network person, they’re the compute person, they’re the storage person. When you go down that stack of the pace of change of AI driving these customers to do things faster, building in complexity as a result, trying to figure out, ‘OK, how do we do more with less resources?’ That really has an effect on IT infrastructure.”

To meet these evolving demands, PowerStore provides an intelligent, adaptive platform that enables businesses to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management. By leveraging AI-driven storage, PowerStore simplifies complexity while ensuring seamless scalability, according to Hogeland.

“It’s the core design concepts of PowerStore,” he added. “The product’s been to life four and a half years … but I do remember the executive leadership team … talking about PowerStore for this category of storage being the strategic future, not just for Dell Technologies, but for the industry. The reason is because of the intelligence that we’ve built into the platform … being able to make smart decisions on behalf of the administrator. So, that’s focusing on … making the intelligence simple.”

AI-driven storage: The brains behind PowerStore’s intelligence

PowerStore applies AI and ML to optimize workloads, making it a leader in AI-driven storage and reducing manual effort for IT teams. Dynamic Node Affinity enhances block storage performance in real-time, improving responsiveness and reducing latency without human intervention. By handling these adjustments automatically, PowerStore allows IT teams to prioritize strategy over routine storage management, Hogeland explained.

“I affectionately call it DNA because I think there’s a lot of intelligence and logic built into there,” he said. “What if … in real-time, as I was coming into the infrastructure … I can guarantee you better performance [and] lower latency if I just flip this back in path and nobody cares? What if it did that for you? Well, we’ve solved the ‘what if.’ That’s what DNA is actually doing.”

PowerStore’s self-optimizing capabilities automate key storage functions, reducing complexity for IT teams. By leveraging hardware offloading and intelligent data placement, the platform ensures performance remains uncompromised while simplifying management, according to Hogeland.

“We’ve got hardware offloading capabilities where there’s no performance impact, but also, data placement,” he said. “Being able to cluster, put multiple appliances together, manage them from the same pane of glass, from the same interface, being able to say, ‘I just need to create a volume, and I want that volume to land where it needs to land without having to make all these different decisions.’ So, self-optimizing can go through the design principles of the stack.”

PowerStore’s built-in security: AI-driven protection

As PowerStore applies AI and machine learning to optimize performance, it also leverages intelligence to enhance security, embedding proactive safeguards directly into its AI-driven storage platform. PowerStore strengthens security through integrations with Dell’s APEX AIOps, an AI-powered system that provides intelligent monitoring and proactive issue resolution.

“We’re skimming the NIST.gov database for known [common vulnerabilities and exposures], exploits,” Hogeland said. “[We’re] 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.’”

PowerStore employs a hardware root of trust to strengthen security further, ensuring software integrity by verifying all updates with digitally signed instances. This process prevents tampering and ensures that only trusted code is deployed.

“You download a digitally signed instance of that software update from Dell Technologies that joins the Intel chipset [and] creates this hardware-level root of trust, guaranteeing the integrity of that code base, so there’s no malicious code,” Hogeland said. “Now, we can go investigate what you’re seeing, but it’s not malicious code.”

Scaling enterprise storage: PowerStore’s expanding footprint

With security as a foundational element, PowerStore also delivers on scalability and seamless enterprise integration. Its rapid adoption has made it one of Dell’s fastest-growing storage architectures, with 90% of Fortune 500 companies using the platform, according to an article Hogeland wrote on LinkedIn.

“PowerStore has been experiencing record-breaking growth over the past four years,” Hogeland said in the article. “Michael Dell and other Dell executive leaders have stated, ‘PowerStore is the fastest-growing new architecture in Dell history.’”

PowerStore’s deep integration with Dell’s ecosystem, including SmartFabric for automated storage networking, further strengthens its position as an AI-driven storage solution for modern enterprises. By simplifying zoning and provisioning, Smart Fabric accelerates the deployment of non-volatile memory express over transmission control protocol environments while reducing manual effort and configuration errors, Hogeland explained.

“It’s an interesting perspective given that Dell Technologies is a portfolio company and not just a storage portfolio company, but with compute and network capabilities,” he said. “We do have a very focused, better-together strategy within our portfolio of data center products.”

With a developer-first approach, PowerStore simplifies storage management through application programming interface-driven automation. By enabling easier integration with modern infrastructure tools, IT teams can create more agile, responsive environments, according to Hogeland.

“All of that integration with container storage modules, whether Terraform integration or … REST API scripts, or … into a Kubernetes environment,” he added. “All of that stuff is there. It was designed to be very open.”

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

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