Dell Technologies welcomed the new PowerStore 500 entry-level system, updated software, and performance enhancements to the PowerStore portfolio today. 

Dell introduced 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, last May. This midrange storage system, which sits between PowerMax for high-end storage and PowerVault for entry-level storage, is the fastest ramping new architecture in the company's history, said Jon Siegal, VP of product marketing at Dell Technologies. “We grew 8% year on year and largely on the back of PowerStore.” 

The all-flash arrays’ programmable infrastructure aims to optimize and automate storage workflows from application toolsets to cut deployment time from days to seconds.

“We feel like we've really strengthened our capabilities here to drive more momentum in the mid-range space with PowerStore,” Siegal said. After a year on the market, the vendor claims to have made the PowerStore portfolio more accessible with the new, low-cost PowerStore 500 to the existing 1000, 3000, 5000, 7000, and 9000 models. “No one can predict the future, but businesses are going to need storage that is going to be flexible enough to grow and evolve with them,” he added. “We think PowerStore will do just that.”

The PowerStore family is constructed with end-to-end non-volatile memory express (NVMe) and a built-in, real-time machine learning (ML) engine with dual-ported Intel Optane SSDs for Storage Class Memory (SCM) as persistent storage. It also boasts additional memory for more processing power with the addition of Intel’s Xeon Scalable Processor. It’s worth noting that competitor Pure Storage also features Intel’s Xeon Scalable Processor in its third-generation all-NVMe FlashArray//X controllers that hit the market last year. 

The ML-powered platform automates labor-intensive processes, suggesting optimal data placement in what Dell calls a “future proof architecture” for when SCM becomes more readily available in the future. 

The new hardware features the lowest maximum raw capacity of the PowerStore lineup at 384 terabytes (TB). Dell said that a cluster of four PowerStore 500s supports up to 1.2 petabytes (PB) of raw capacity and scales up to 4.8 PB of capacity per cluster. For even larger configurations customers, can get up to almost 10 PB of capacity by mixing and matching with other PowerStore models. Customers can add PowerStore 500 to existing PowerStore clusters.

The 500 model also scales over distances thanks to its support for the PowerStore Metro Node, which Dell announced earlier this year. This offers synchronous replication in mobility over Metro distances and allows the 500 to participate in distributed enterprise services as well as disaster recovery scenarios.

“This is absolutely a game changer,” Siegal said. “It packs an incredible punch with a lot of enterprise storage class capabilities for the price,” which starts at $28,000, or $460 a month.

The PowerStore 2.0 software update gives a speed boost to the entire portfolio to deliver up to 25% workload performance improvements, the vendor claims. It also adds NVMe over Fibre Channel (NVMe-FC) support and new scale-out and appliance clustering capabilities for PowerStore’s industry-first AppsON feature.

In the initial release, NVMe was used within the appliance, while over the network, the transport mechanism remained standard scuzzy, Siegal explained. The new software extends the benefits of NVMe across the network. NVMe-FC will enable customers to make an external network array essentially feel like direct attached storage to the house itself. It simply requires a software update and no additional hardware.

The update adds a scale-out capability to its AppsON service that enables VMware virtualized workloads to run directly on PowerStore for faster access to data and quicker response times. Thanks to a built-in VMware vSphere integration, storage administration can streamline and consolidate targeted external virtual machines for edge computing, remote office/branch office, mobile and tactical deployments.

AppsON complements existing platforms including Dell Technologies hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) PowerFlex products by providing a landing zone for storage-intensive workloads that require data efficiency and “always on” data reduction.  Customers can cluster multiple PowerStore appliances to consolidate storage intensive workloads at the edge or run big data analytics applications directly on the array. The new clustering support will allow customers to move workloads within an intelligent PowerStore cluster.

PowerStore’s AI and ML got an intelligence update with CloudIQ, a cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) that allows customers to monitor the health and troubleshoot Dell EMC’s storage systems. 

Data reduction gets smarter with an Intelligent Data Reduction functionality that is always running without impacting performance. It simplifies storage management by optimizing capacity and performance while delivering a guaranteed 4:1 data reduction, Siegal said. Essentially what this does is allow customers to meet their performance SLA as well as their data reduction goals.

Improved resiliency via PowerStore’s Dynamic Resiliency Engine (DRE) automates complex processes associated with drive configuration, as well as redundancy and spearing, for up to 98% less management effort compared to traditional RAID configurations.  

And finally, PowerStore uses SCM as a persistent storage tier that provides caching times that are faster than basic flash, but both slower and cheaper than DRAM. The latest version of software in PowerStore now differentiates between SCM and NVMe within the same chassis. This means that customers can now use SCM drives as a high performance layer with as few as one drive for metadata access and allow them reduce workload latency by up to 15%, Siegal explained.