When Dell Technologies Inc. released the first details of its all-flash object storage appliance – the EXF900 – late last year, it declared a break from the perception of object as “slow, cheap and deep.”

In a sign of change within the object store arena, Dell EMC is now also providing ObjectScale with a software-defined, containerized, high-performance architecture in a Kubernetes-centric solution that can scale to any capacity and connect from edge to core.

“Historically, object storage was considered this cheap and deep place; customers would use this for their backup data and archive data,” said Anahad Dhillon (pictured), director of product strategy and planning at Dell EMC. “The object space is now maturing, and we’re seeing customers using object for their primary data, for their business-critical data. Customers now want object storage or storage in general being orchestrated like they would orchestrate their customer applications.”

Dhillon spoke with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE. They discussed the company’s use of non-volatile memory to deliver higher performance, planned upgrades for its ObjectScale offering, and an opportunity to test the latest object storage technology for free. (* Disclosure below.)

Support for NVMe

A key enhancement for Dell’s EXF900 offering involved the use of non-volatile memory express solid state drives and NVMe-over-fabric to access backend support as part of a planned code update for the company’s ECS software.

“We did it the right way,” Dhillon said. “We didn’t just go in and qualify an SSD-based server and run object storage on it; we invested time and effort in supporting NVMe-over-fabric so we could give you that performance at scale. Now you’ve got an NVMe-based offering for EXF900 that you can deploy with confidence and run your primary workloads that require high throughput and low latency.”

Dell plans to replatform its Elastic Cloud Storage solution to facilitate ObjectScale as a Kubernetes-native offering, according to Dhillon.

“We’re leveraging that microservices-based architecture, leveraging native orchestration capabilities of Kubernetes,” he explained. “It’s limitless. It allows our customers to start small, as small as three nodes, and grow their environment as the business grows to hundreds of nodes.”

IT users interested in a free, in-depth demo of the new ObjectScale offering will be able to test-drive the product through a download.

“You can download a free, full-featured community edition,” Dhillon noted. “We’re confident in what we’re delivering, and we want you to play with it without having your money tied up.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE