LAS VEGAS — Dell EMC dropped a bunch of data center technology updates at Dell Technologies World today, including hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and an NVMe-based storage array with a built-in machine learning.

“One of the key attributes of the modern data center is end-to-end NVMe storage,” said Jeff Clarke, vice chairman of products and operations at Dell, onstage at Dell Technologies World. “The future of the modern data center is today.”

During his keynote, Clarke announced the new Dell EMC PowerMax storage array, which he described as “the world’s fastest storage array today and in the future.” He said it delivers up to 10 million inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) along with 50 percent better times and is two times faster than the nearest competitor.

The storage array has NVMe-based drives and NVMe-based disk array enclosure. It also supports NVMe-over-fabric and is Storage Class Memory (SCM) ready, meaning that customers can add SCM drives to the PowerMax array when they become available next year.

NVMe is a protocol for fast flash drive connections, and NVMe over fabric (NVMe-oF) uses a networking fabric to connect storage nodes. SCM is the next phase of this super-high-speed, low-latency technology, and it is expected to come to market next year.

Wicked-Smart Storage

The new array also comes with a built-in machine learning engine, which uses predictive analytics and pattern recognition to improve storage performance. “It makes decisions around things like data placement, data reduction,” explained Bob DeCrescenzo, senior vice president of Dell EMC storage. “It’s wicked-smart, as we say in Boston.”

The storage software can analyze 425 billion data sets in real time across Dell EMC’s high-end all-flash customer base. “And it does this all without the aid of a storage administrator,” Clarke said.

It also includes inline deduplication and enhanced compression, which the company claims provides five-to-one data reduction.

In addition to the new storage array, Clarke gave a “sneak peak” of the PowerEdge MX modular infrastructure, which will be available in the second half of this year. It uses Dell EMC’s kinetic infrastructure and is geared toward dense virtualization, software-defined storage and software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV) and big data analytic environments.

HCI Updates With VMware

And Clarke announced new HCI updates to VxRail appliances and VxRack SDDC systems, which are available now. Both HCI products are  jointly engineered with VMware and leverage vSphere for compute and vSAN for storage.

VxRail is Dell EMC’s turnkey HCI appliance, while VxRack is more of a build-your-own system geared toward larger enterprises that want to stand up a VMware-based rack-scale software defined data center environment.

VxRail is Dell EMC’s top-selling HCI product. Some of its updates include:

NVMe cache drive options.

  • Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, supporting up to 1.5TB of RAM per CPU socket for two-times more memory.
  • Nvidia Tesla P40 GPU accelerators providing two-times performance and 50 percent more users for high-end graphics use cases .
  • New 25GbE networking, which Dell EMC says provides the most aggregate bandwidth of any other HCI appliance and up to 50 percent more networking connectivity options than the previous generation.

VxRack SDDC updates include:

  • New configurations built on VxRail hardware with the latest Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation server platforms, designed for HCI.
  • The latest VMware Cloud Foundation 2.3 with newly integrated cloud management and automation for on-premises IT.
  • SDDC automation and serviceability extensions integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation.

Photo: Dell’s Jeff Clarke gives a day two keynote at Dell Technologies World 2018.