Dell EMC PowerMax extends storage leadership to address customers' most pressing IT needs in cloud, automation and next-generation workload optimization

News summary:

• Dell EMC PowerMax is the first storage system to ship Storage Class Memory powered by dual port Intel® Optane™ SSDs as true persistent storage, designed to maximize performance and eliminate bottlenecks.
• NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) is now available on Dell EMC PowerMax, achieving lower latency and significantly improved response times for resource-intensive applications.
• New VMware, Ansible and Kubernetes integrations address the industry's growing need for automation, allowing customers to easily manage complex infrastructure and support DevOps cycles with infrastructure as code.
• Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Designs for Dell EMC PowerMax offers more efficiency and flexibility in building hybrid cloud environments.

Full Story
Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL) is announcing significant updates to Dell EMC PowerMax, incorporating next-generation technologies to ensure best-in-class performance for today and tomorrow's most critical applications.

Since launching in 2018, Dell EMC PowerMax has helped high-end storage customers across all industries, including top-tier banks, cloud service providers and healthcare companies, support their most demanding applications where low latency is key and the highest resiliency is paramount. Dell EMC is the undisputed leader of the high-end storage market according to IDC with a 43.9% share; nearly triple that of the next highest competitor. ⁱ

An Industry-First: Dell EMC PowerMax Introduces Dual Port SCM SSDs as Persistent Storage
Dell EMC PowerMax is first-to-market with dual port Intel^® Optane™ SSDs and the use of Storage Class Memory (SCM) as persistent storage. The dual port Intel^® Optane™ SSDs are the result of co-development between Dell and Intel and mark the latest innovation stemming from a decades-long partnership between the two companies.

Dell Technologies is also announcing that NVMe-oF is now available for all PowerMax arrays, enabling true end-to-end NVMe to deliver the performance and lower latency required by today's modern enterprise.

End-to-end NVMe on PowerMax is made possible by newly qualified PowerMax 32Gb FC I/O modules, 32Gb Connectrix switches, directors and 32Gb NVMe host adapters with Dell EMC PowerPath multipathing software. Dell EMC PowerPath, known for its resiliency and migration capabilities, is the first enterprise-class SAN multipathing software with full support for NVMe-oF.ⁱⁱ

The combination of PowerMax's unique, scale-out, end-to-end NVMe architecture and this industry-first use of SCM provides customers with a faster, more efficient storage system that delivers these performance improvements:   

• Up to 15M IOPS ⁱⁱⁱ
• Up to 350GB/sec Bandwidth ^iv
• Up to 50% Better Response Times ^v
• Sub-100us (microseconds) Read Response Times ^vi

PowerMax's built-in machine learning engine leverages predictive analytics and pattern recognition to automatically place data on the correct media type (SCM or Flash) based on its IO profile. PowerMax analyzes and forecasts 40 million data sets in real-time, driving 6 billion decisions per day ^vii, resulting in significant time savings and maximum performance at minimum cost.

Streamline Operations and Speed Application Development
Dell EMC PowerMax now allows customers to easily automate infrastructure operations and DevOps workflows. Customers can now serve PowerMax storage for configuration management and application deployment, including containerized workloads. And PowerMax's automated infrastructure provisioning and management tasks enable customers' agile and efficient IT operations with:

• VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) plug-in, available now on the VMware Solutions Exchange, allows customers to develop end-to-end automation routines including provisioning, data protection and host operations. Customers can also offer these automated routines as self-service catalog items on the VMware vRealize Automation platform.
• Pre-built Ansible modules allow customers to create Playbooks for storage provisioning, snapshots and data management workflows for consistent and automated operations. These modules are available on GitHub now.
• The new Container Storage Interface (CSI) plug-in for PowerMax provisions and manages storage for workloads running on Kubernetes. The CSI plugin, available now on GitHub, extends PowerMax's uncompromising performance and world class data services to a growing number of applications built on a micro-services-based architecture.

Cloud Flexibility with Dell EMC PowerMax
Customers can now incorporate Dell EMC PowerMax into their multi-cloud strategies in a variety of different ways, all of which provide world class availability, flexibility, security and performance with the agility of hybrid cloud operations.

First, the just-released Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Designs for Dell EMC PowerMax helps organizations build their own hybrid cloud infrastructure while offering deployment flexibility for workloads that have unique external storage-specific requirements, including independent capacity scaling and advanced features such as integrated data protection.

Dell EMC storage arrays PowerMax and Unity XT are the first to be validated with VMware Cloud Foundation through Fibre Channel as primary storage, within workload domains, in addition to existing support through Network File System (NFS) protocol.

Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services delivers Dell EMC Storage as a public cloud service for Disaster Recovery across AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, plus many multi-cloud use cases including analytics and test/dev. Cloud Storage Services is designed to save time on system management, provides enterprise-grade data security, performance, capacity, replication, and availability in public clouds.

Availability
PowerMax with NVMe-oF, dual port Intel^® Optane™ SSDs will be available globally on Monday, September 16. Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Designs for Dell EMC PowerMax, Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services and the plug-ins mentioned above are available now.

Supporting Quotes
"Dell EMC PowerMax is the crown jewel of our storage environment and PowerMax NVMe over Fibre Channel with 32 Gig is certainly very exciting," said Steve Kouvo, Technology Architect, Core Technology Services at Boston Scientific. "We have a true partnership with Dell. Like Boston Scientific, Dell EMC is always innovating. They care about our business and want us to succeed."

"Since PowerMax's NVMe is done right, we have eliminated the storage bottleneck and applications can reach their fullest potential," said Bryan Peroutka, Technical Solutions Architect, World Wide Technology. "We value the innovation Dell EMC continues to bring to the industry."

"As the value of data increases and mission-critical apps demand more power and lower latency, IT professionals are struggling to balance performance and security while also transforming their IT operations," said Scott Sinclair, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "These new updates to Dell EMC PowerMax's deliver breakthrough performance by matching an accelerated, next-level protocol with accelerated, next-level persistent media, allowing customers to continue IT infrastructure modernization without compromise."

Additional Resources

• Join us for the Dell EMC PowerMax webcast to learn more about the industry firsts announced today.
• Connect with Dell EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn

About Dell Technologies
Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL) is a unique family of businesses that helps organizations and individuals build their digital future and transform how they work and live. The company provides customers with the industry's broadest and most innovative technology and services portfolio spanning from edge to core to cloud. The Dell Technologies family includes Dell,  Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks , Virtustream and VMware .