Dell EMC rolled out the first update to its high-end storage PowerMax platform, which it initially introduced at Dell Technologies World in 2018. The update includes storage class memory (SCM) as a storage tier, dual port Intel Optane drives in support of non-volatile memory express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), as well as integrations with VMware, Ansible, and Kubernetes.

Dell EMC is staking claim as the "first-to-market with Storage Class Memory (SCM) as true persistent storage," with 32Gb NVMe-oF for Fibre channel connectivity. 

NVMe is a protocol for fast flash drive connections, and NVMe over fabric (NVMe-oF) uses a networking fabric to connect storage nodes. SCM as a storage tier provides caching times that are faster than basic flash but both slower and cheaper than DRAM. 

PowerMax is constructed with end-to-end NVMe and a built-in, real-time machine learning (ML) engine. The ML-powered platform can automatically place data between two types of media, NVMe SCM and NVMe flash drives, in what Dell calls a “future proof architecture” for when SCM becomes more readily available in the future. 

“Future proof architecture is about having an architecture that's designed to provide the right data at the right service-level agreement at the right time,” said Caitlin Gordon, Dell EMC vice president of product marketing. “And with PowerMax, that means having what we call ‘NVMe done right,’ which is having end-to-end NVMe, built with industry standard media, which is a combination of both NVMe-based flash drive, and the new generation of media, which is the SCM technology, and specifically the dual-ported Optane drives.”

PowerMax boasts up to 15 million IOPS, up to 350 GB/s from a bandwidth standpoint, up to 50% better response times, under 100 microseconds read latency, the company claims.

“NVMe with flash gives you a huge benefit from a performance standpoint. But ultimately, just as flash disrupted spinning disk, storage class memory is poised to disrupt flash. And that's why NVMe is really more of getting to that end state of SCM,” said Gordon.

At VMworld 2019, Dell Technologies announced Cloud Validated Designs including those for Dell EMC PowerMax and Dell EMC Unity storage arrays. These reference architectures target organization across multi-cloud infrastructures for workloads that require specific storage requirements, such as integrated protection.

With today's announcement, the Container Storage Interface (CSI) plug-in for PowerMax adds integrated support for Kubernetes and containers to these hybrid cloud storage platform.

“It enables you to put containerized workloads on PowerMax, so you can get all of the best of speed performance, the data services that you have for the rest of your data center now also available for your containerized workloads,” Gordon explained. 

PowerMax updates also include a plug-in VMware vRealize Orchestrator for integrated automation of tasks like data protection and provisioning. Customers can also offer these automated routines as self-service catalog items on the VMware vRealize Automation platform.

Pre-built modules for RedHat Ansible allow customers to create Playbooks for storage provisioning, snapshots, and data management workflows for consistent and automated operations.

Both the Red Hat Ansible and container tools are available on GitHub.