Enterprise Storage: Dell PowerStore for AI-driven efficiency

A product tagline can offer more than just a catchy slogan, and the description of Dell Technologies Inc.’s PowerStore provides further insight into the tech giant’s evolving enterprise storage and AI strategy.

Dell positions PowerStore as an AI innovation by offering “the smart choice for all-flash storage,” leveraging the efficiency and resiliency that flash technology can offer. This is the tagline for its unified storage products, which emphasizes the three core pillars of the company’s approach: technology for AI, choice for customers, and all-flash reliability.

“Customers are really looking for solutions that leverage storage for generative AI and provide the flexibility and choice of a private cloud,” said Travis Vigil, Dell senior vice president of product management, in a recent interview with SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE. said in an interview. Media live streaming studio. “From our perspective, this is a pivotal time in IT, with customers taking advantage of this rise in generative AI to reevaluate their data strategies.”

This feature is part of SiliconANGLE Media’s investigation into Dell’s market impact in the enterprise AI and storage industries. (*Disclosure below.)

Enterprise storage flexibility

The company’s release of PowerStore Prime in May highlighted Dell’s interest in providing customers with a variety of choices when it comes to enterprise storage deployments. Improved native replication for block and file storage workloads on Windows, VMware, and Linux with easier deployment of software updates.

This announcement aims to provide flexibility to customers who are currently finding their way financially and technically in the evolving world of generative AI. Dell builds infrastructure for enterprise workloads large and small to meet the needs of powering AI-driven initiatives.

“Customers recognize that small, purpose-built models trained on the right data are potentially more beneficial than large models running in the public cloud,” said Dell’s senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Ihab Taraji said in an interview. The Cube. “When you look at Dell’s server and storage portfolio, we serve customers of all sizes.”

Dell is focused on streamlining management and increasing security through automated data storage solutions. These include SmartFabric Storage Software (SFSS), which facilitates endpoint discovery, registration, and event notification.

“We have a much more focused and better federated strategy in our data center product portfolio,” Jodey Hogeland, global storage technologist at Dell, said in an interview with theCUBE. “If you look at what’s happening with SmartFabric Storage Software, you can actually automate the process of deploying, zoning, and introducing pure new hosts into your environment, all of which is seamless.”

Dell solutions take advantage of the speed and communication capabilities that all-flash storage technology can provide compared to traditional hard drives and HDDs. All-flash can significantly improve storage performance by speeding up data access and reducing latency.

PowerStore Prime includes the latest releases of Dell’s enterprise all-flash arrays. The company claims PowerStore Prime data documents up to 30% higher input/output operations per second (IOPS), 20% lower latency, and twice the volume or storage that can be addressed to hosts. has been published.

Building a resilient storage platform

Resiliency is an important part of the PowerStore Prime release. As IT organizations grapple with the growing threat of AI-driven malware and ransomware attacks, Dell is focused on integrating simplified data protection and recovery processes. Our solution includes PowerStore and PowerProtect Data Domain integration in a single management user interface. PowerStore data can be backed up on-premises to a software-defined appliance or PowerProtect Data Domain appliance, or to the cloud using APEX Protection Storage.

Drew Schulke, Dell’s vice president of product management, said it was designed to address a threat landscape made more complex by the reality that new AI tools are now in the hands of malicious actors. It’s a solution.

“71% of CIOs characterize the threat level of AI within their organizations as very high or moderately high,” Schulke said in a recent conversation with theCUBE. “We need to be conscious of that aspect of AI as well. Given all of the unknowns about storage needs and the evolving threat landscape, it’s important to ensure we have systems that will continue to be used in the future. And That applies to resiliency as well as other aspects of the platform.”

Replication, which replicates data to remote systems, is another important element of storage resiliency. Dell supports synchronous and asynchronous replication of PowerStore to simplify recovery while minimizing the potential impact of a system failure or compromise. Integrations with other Dell products allow you to replicate your data on-premises or in the cloud.

Synchronous replication, introduced with the May release of PowerStoreOS 4.0, provides data consistency between source and destination volumes during normal operations. Asynchronous replication allows you to first write data to the primary storage array and then commit the data to be replicated to a memory or disk-based journal. Dell’s replication approach is designed to provide data redundancy and protection against storage system failure. PowerStore’s replication rules provide protection policies that minimize downtime and meet your disaster recovery needs.

“With the full integration of our data protection products into our PowerProtect portfolio, called Storage Direct, we begin to see a better alignment story within ISG,” said Schulke. “Storage administrators can set backup and restore policies for Dell PowerProtect systems, which can be on-premises, at a third site, or in the public cloud. Provide resiliency if something goes wrong. We have incredible flexibility in what we can do.”

Leverage AI to improve security and efficiency

In addition to resiliency, Dell has also added generative AI capabilities to PowerStore. Dell’s APEX AIOps Software-as-a-Service optimizes the health and service availability of Dell’s infrastructure and provides real-time anomaly detection for storage products.

“With Dell Technologies APEX AIOps, we have fully embedded and integrated cybersecurity assessment capabilities,” said Hogeland. “We scour the NIST.gov database for known CVEs and exploits and say, ‘Hey, we just detected that there’s a known exploit published in your environment. Here’s how to fix it. What we need to do to address this and get rid of it.”

This AI integration focuses on Dell’s focus on building efficiency into its storage portfolio. Whether using automation to monitor for threats or PowerStore’s advanced data reduction technology to increase efficiency, our value proposition helps organizations avoid costly outages and improve performance. It is to do.

Data reduction is an approach developed by Dell to help customers save money. PowerStore’s intelligent deduplication and compression is part of our 5:1 data reduction guarantee methodology. If a customer does not receive a 5:1 result during the prepaid maintenance period, Dell says it will ship a new drive free of charge. By centralizing many key enterprise functions within PowerStore, Dell customers are using storage deployments as a way to increase efficiency and control costs as workload demands increase.

“One of the great things about PowerStore is that we can support all of these workloads in one place,” Jonathan Kowall, director of specialist solutions engineering at AHEAD, said in a recent interview with theCUBE . “You can run virtualization, run containers, and start running AI on one system. It’s the efficiency in hours and how you manage and maintain this.”

PowerStore Prime, introduced by Dell in May, is described by company executives as the most significant storage solution release in four years. Its latest iteration demonstrates the company’s interest in providing an intelligent and adaptable data storage platform through the integration of networking and compute and storage. This is a key element in Dell’s strategic approach to enterprise AI and will be worth keeping an eye on as the company rolls out additional PowerStore enhancements in 2025.

“Our bet is that networking needs to be integrated with compute and storage to deliver very high throughput,” said Dell’s Vigil. “The networking strategy we chose to obtain high-performance switches with superior throughput and fully integrate stack and compute is exactly what AI needs.”

Check out the full coverage of the Smarter Storage for Tomorrow’s Opportunities event by SiliconANGLE and theCUBE.

(* 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 any other sponsor has editorial control over theCUBE or SiliconANGLE’s content. yeah.)

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