Dell Technologies Inc. is beefing up its portfolio of network-attached storage systems, including its Dell EMC PowerScale hardware, with enhancements aimed at providing more flexible consumption and management of unstructured data.

The need for greater flexibility when it comes to managing unstructured data was recently cited as an “uber trend” by International Data Corp. Enterprises, it says, are increasingly demanding capabilities around mixed media support, nondisruptive scalability, ease of public cloud integration and multiple access methods. IDC explains these capabilities are needed to support a mix of enterprise file-based workloads such as artificial intelligence and machine learning and traditional use cases such as file consolidation and archives.

To deliver on these capabilities, Dell today announced a number of innovations in its popular Dell EMC PowerScale systems. They include the launch of new PowerScale hybrid nodes and archive nodes that it says can deliver up to 75% more performance than comparable nodes of its type.

The Dell EMC PowerScale NAS systems are storage devices connected to a network that allows storage and retrieval of data from a centralized location for authorized network users and heterogeneous clients. NAS systems are flexible and “scale-out,” meaning that as customers need additional storage, they can add on to what they have.

“With the new PowerScale hybrid (H700 and H7000) and archive nodes (A300 and A3000), we have completed the refresh of the Isilon product line that started last year with the release of the PowerScale all-flash F200 and F600 nodes and continued with the announcement of the PowerScale F900 all-flash nodes,” David Noy, vice president of product management for unstructured data solutions at Dell, wrote in a blog post. “These new, more powerful hybrid and archive nodes offer more cores, memory and cache, additional networking options, and deliver complete node compatibility with your existing PowerScale and Isilon clusters.”

In addition, the company announced enhancements to its PowerScale OneFS and DataIQ software that expand storage management, performance monitoring, auditing and compliance to simplify file storage at scale. Further, Dell said it’s bolstering its application programming interface-integrated ransomware protection capabilities, and it added a Dynamic NAS Protection feature with PowerProtect Data Manager that makes it simple to protect NAS systems with enhanced backups of file data.

New features in OneFS include writeable snapshots faster upgrades, secure boot, improved data reduction and smaller file efficiency, Noy said. Meanwhile, the DataIQ updates, available later this quarter, are said to deliver an improved user experience for large scale clusters plus user interface enhancements that make them easier to navigate. DataIQ also gains the ability to run reports in order to analyze data volumes by time stamps.

The added ransomware protection comes via a update to Superna Inc.’s new Cyber Protection and Recovery solution for Dell EMC PowerScale, Noy said. The service adds hosting options for multicloud deployments within Multi-Cloud Data Services enabled by Faction Inc. That makes it possible for customers to recovery data from any cyberattack that leverages the public cloud, Noy said.

As for the Dynamic NAS Protection, it was introduced as a simple and modern way to protect NAS systems. Noy said it works by intelligently and automatically scaling to optimize performance and enable protection and recovery for any network file system or common internet file system.

Noy made some big claims about the hybrid PowerScale node’s ability to handle “any data workload, from the edge, to the core, to the cloud” with unprecedented ease. He noted PowerScale’s all-flash nodes are performance-optimized with support for Nvidia GPUDirect for intensive workloads such as AI, data analytics and genomic sequencing.

“We have proven in labs – these are not theoretical numbers – that we can scale linearly up to 252GB/sec of read throughput,” he said. “Hybrid nodes are ideal for the best price/performance results needed by mixed workloads, such as media and entertainment, healthcare, life sciences, analytics, automotive.”

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