Dell Technologies today introduced its Dell EMC PowerFlex software-defined storage (SDS), a high-performance system that the vendor said completes its three-year journey to simplify its infrastructure portfolio.

This product launch adds the PowerFlex family, previously known as VxFlex — its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) integrated systems that was unified under VxFlex last year — to the Power portfolio, which has seen a steady stream of updates over the past couple of weeks. 

Dell EMC PowerStore, an all-flash storage array that the vendor says is up to seven times faster and three times more responsive than its previous midrange storage entries, launched in May. PowerStore is its midrange storage system that sits between PowerMax for high-end storage and PowerVault for entry-level storage. 

Last week the vendor welcomed a new family of storage systems for unstructured data to the Dell EMC portfolio called PowerScale, a storage system that packs the punch of Dell EMC’s heaviest hitters from its server hardware and storage software portfolio running on the next generation of OneFS.

PowerFlex, according to Dell Technologies, rounds out the now-simplified infrastructure portfolio with its flexible foundation for IT infrastructure that the vendor says will enable businesses to better embrace change as it “supports a wide variety of traditional and modern applications, ranging from bare-metal databases and virtualized workloads to modern cloud-native containerized applications, all on a single platform.” This architecture makes for quick rebuilds when drives or nodes fail. 

It’s called Flex for a reason. The appliance allows customers to mix, match, create, and scale with a two-layer disaggregated infrastructure that is suitable for data-intensive workloads or deployments that require compute and storage to scale separately. It is designed to run disaggregated, bare metal, or multi-hypervisor deployments and “scale capacity, IO performance and throughput linearly to 1000s of nodes and achieve six-nines (99.9999%) availability,” wrote Travis Vigil, SVP of product management for Dell Technologies Storage and Data Protection, in a blog post. 

It is “validated and optimized for a broad ecosystem of enterprise workloads and cloud automation platforms” including Oracle and SQL Server, enterprise applications like SAP HANA, analytics workloads like Splunk, SAS and Elastic Stack, and cloud automation platforms that include Red Hat OpenShift, VMware Cloud Foundation, Dell Technologies Cloud, Kubernetes, and Google Anthos.

In terms of filling a market demand, and taking the titanic amount of data being generated daily into consideration, this launch caters to customers’ need to modernize their “applications and infrastructure as business needs continue to change.” 

Also new to the former VxFlex OS is a native asynchronous replication capability, alongside the existing sync replication, and disaster recovery with recovery point objective as low as 30 seconds.

And for healthcare, finance, and users with specific corporate governance and compliance requirements, the vendor included a secure snapshot feature.