Dell Technologies welcomed a new family of storage systems for unstructured data to the Dell EMC portfolio today with the launch of PowerScale. 

PowerScale packs the punch of Dell EMC’s heaviest hitters from its server hardware and storage software portfolio running on the next generation of OneFS. This is the operating system that also powers Dell EMC Isilon, its scale-out, network-attached file storage for backup and archiving of unstructured data.

Dell says PowerScale sets the new standard for managing unstructured storage because it was designed to manage data growth while offering insight into the data that drives business decisions.

Over the next five years unstructured data is expected to triple, according to a Gartner report. And it has become harder to manage the speed at which data is collected. Couple that with the dispersed amount of unstructured data spread across more locations — not just in the data center, but also in the cloud and at the edge — and, well, you have yourself a mess. This mess is the present day data challenge and reality for many organizations.    

Companies require systems for diverse data applications that can process growing amounts of unstructured data like text, images, video, and audio. This making agile, scalable, and cost-effective storage platforms for unstructured data a necessity – especially while enterprises continue to accelerate their remote workforces. 

Edge and public clouds in particular, according to Caitlin Gordon, VP of product marketing for Dell Technologies, are becoming increasingly important landscapes where data is being generated.  “And we all know that budgets aren't going to triple to support that, they're going to remain about flat,” Gordon said.  

Leveraging new 1U PowerEdge-based PowerScale nodes and existing Isilon all-flash, hybrid and archive nodes, the platform's scalability is a boon for speed. Dell boasts speeds of 15.8 million input-output operations per second (IOPS) with the new all-flash nodes that it says are five times faster than its predecessor. The compact size also make it a good fit for edge deployments.

For customers looking to move or deploy applications in public clouds, Dell offers a PowerScale flavor called PowerScale for Multi-cloud that connects directly to all major public clouds as a managed service. And following its storage partnership with Google Cloud announced last month, Dell also offers a specific PowerScale for Google Cloud version.

The platform also has a programmable infrastructure based on Dell EMC’s recent PowerStore platform that supports orchestration frameworks including Kubernetes, Ansible, and OpenShift to streamline application development and reduce deployment timeframes. 

In what Gordon referred to as the “best kept secret of the PowerScale announcement,” Dell EMC also unveiled DataIQ, its intelligent data software. By removing data silos through a single view of file and object data across Dell EMC, third-parties, and public cloud storage, the vendor contends that DataIQ will help companies extract business value from unstructured data that would otherwise remain uncategorized and siloed.

Organizations are generally clueless as to what information they have, what it’s value is, and why they even store it. So, when it comes time to actually find information, it's exhaustive, expensive, and the farthest thing from efficient. 

Ultimately Dell aims to equip users with the tools to take back control of their data, ensuring the right teams have access to it, and storing it in the right tier within their storage environment. And it should be noted that organizations with no control over their data make themselves an easy target for cybercriminals.

Also included with PowerScale is Dell EMC’s CloudIQ infrastructure monitoring and analytics software that enables predictive analytics to monitor infrastructure health.