Dell Technologies updated its PowerFlex software-defined infrastructure platform to support customers in continuously modernizing the data center storage experience.

Dell PowerFlex 4.5 includes an expanded range of supported operating systems (OS), enhanced alert reporting, a single namespace for capacity and unified storage pool management.

Dell customers tend to run a variety of operating systems and hypervisors in their data centers, and the diversity of platform's OS support "gives users the capability to consume PowerFlex volumes in almost any OS, hypervisor or container platform," Shannon Champion, Dell VP of product marketing, told SDxCentral. "They bring their needs to the table, and PowerFlex is ready to meet them," she said.

Specifically, PowerFlex is now compatible with the latest versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Ubuntu and ESXi. It also introduced support for the latest Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform via Dell's container storage interface (CSI) integration and the expanded transport control protocol (TCP) and nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) capabilities of ESXi, "which can be fully leveraged for increased multipathing and volume counts," Champion said, in addition to existing support for Windows, VMware vSphere, Citrix and other major Linux operating systems.

This variety "is a big part of how PowerFlex enables effective data center consolidation," she said.

The software-defined storage update is targeted at improving alert reporting through refining how PowerFlex batches and reduces the redundancy of repeated alerts. Dell also added a new common event publishing agent (CEPA) to its file services to improve ransomware detection, user access management, quota configuration and storage analytics. Plus, there are new webhooks designed for real-time alert management and reporting through third-party systems like Big Panda. This allows users to set their own notification policies and configure up to three webhook destinations.

This update also expands PowerFlex's ability to address file use cases, even though the platform remains a block-based storage solution. "For the right use cases, having the ability to serve file as well as block storage by just adding a couple of nodes and some software is a great way to layer on functionality without requiring a whole new system," Champion said. According to Dell, customers can see up to 400% increases in file scalability for network attached storage (NAS) servers and 22-times more file snapshots with PowerFlex 4.5.

"Offering block and file storage significantly enhances PowerFlex’s versatility and usability to cater to various applications and use cases" and "further extends the data center consolidation capabilities" of PowerFlex, Champion said.

The platform's single namespace and unified storage pool management both bring customers operational flexibility and simplification. The namespace allows admins to view and manage sizable amounts of filesystems as if they were one. "And they can add and remove filesystems to the namespace ... without having to reconfigure client access," she said.

Plus, admins can use whichever storage pool they want, which "just takes one more hurdle out of their way," she said. They also have the ability to expose nearly 8 petabytes of PowerFlex usable capacity as file capacity under one IP address.

While these updates represent answers to existing customer requests, "the ever-increasing power of the system and its feature set will continue to draw in new customers looking to move to flexible, scalable and extremely performant software-defined infrastructure for their data center," Champion said.