UPDATED 10:30 EST / DECEMBER 11 2024

Dell PowerStore drives innovation in storage, highlighted during Smarter Storage for Tomorrow's Opportunities 2024. AI

Second evolution: Dell’s PowerStore advances to meet today’s and future workloads for all-flash storage

Four years after unveiling PowerStore, Dell Technologies Inc. reshaped its storage offering in 2024 and revealed how all-flash technology has rapidly evolved to meet the needs of the modern enterprise.

The company’s inclusion of quad-level cell, or QLC, as part of its latest release was just one example of how the storage industry is adapting to data processing demands brought on by enterprise adoption of AI. QLC is viewed as an evolutionary step in the flash storage market, a newer form of NAND flash that stores four bits of data per memory cell.

Dell’s introduction of QLC PowerStore as part of PowerStore Prime adds another step in the quest toward higher storage density, with more information retained per cell. The QLC-based solution illustrates how Dell, since its storage offering debuted at the start of the decade, intends to capitalize on its experience with flash.

“We couldn’t have visualized this even five years ago, but the densities, the price, the performance, the reliability around QLC, make it a viable alternative,” said Steve McDowell, principal analyst and founding partner at Nand Research LLC., in an interview with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “We’re starting to see now QLC flash push down into nearline storage. I think we’re about to hit the second evolution of flash.”

This feature is part of SiliconANGLE Media’s exploration of Dell’s market impact in enterprise AI and the storage industry. Be sure to revisit theCUBE’s presentation of the Smarter Storage for Tomorrow’s Opportunities event. (* Disclosure below.)

Enhanced performance and flexibility for PowerStore

Dell’s executives have termed the release of PowerStore Prime in May as “the biggest release for PowerStore in the last four years.” Why does it rise to this level of significance? The enhancements to PowerStore were focused on advances in performance, simplicity, efficiency, reliance and data mobility across multicloud platforms. These are all major priorities in today’s enterprise.

As part of the PowerStore release, Dell made software updates available — that are easier to deploy — to customers at no additional cost that boosted mixed workload performance up to 30%. Native replication for block and file storage workloads in Windows, VMware and Linux were designed to enhance data protection and increase efficiency.

The key to these announcements is the flexibility they offer customers who are currently finding their way budgetarily and technologically through the evolving world of generative AI infrastructure. Dell is intent on building infrastructure that can span a range of enterprise workloads, large and small, cater to the demands of generative AI, and support public and private cloud environments.

“We truly believe that there is a second wave coming as generative AI makes its way into the enterprise,” said Ihab Tarazi, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Dell, in an interview with theCUBE. “Customers realize that potentially a smaller purpose-built model trained on the right data is more beneficial to them than a larger model running in the public cloud. And if you look at the Dell server and storage portfolio, we service customers of all sizes.”

APEX provides cross-platform support

Concurrent with Dell’s announcements this year around PowerStore was the launch of APEX Block Storage for Public Cloud. This offering enables customers to simplify workload mobility by connecting PowerStore to the company’s latest block storage offering.

The integration of the block storage solution with APEX demonstrates how Dell is continuing to evolve its portfolio to create a cross-platform storage approach in keeping with its multicloud strategy. Like PowerStore, APEX was launched by Dell in 2020, and it has been a focus for the company’s storage portfolio, with the release of APEX Block Storage for both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

“APEX was created to deliver multicloud by design — a seamless, modern cloud and consumption-based experience in all locations that bring simplicity, agility and control,” said Shannon Champion, VP of product marketing at Dell, in an interview with theCUBE. “When you look at that from a storage perspective, all of this together really creates that universal storage layer, this common set of software-defined storage services everywhere.”

Dell’s APEX strategy also offers an on-premises focus for consumption-based storage. Over the past year, Dell has expanded its APEX solutions to include a new set of products for on-premises deployment of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud. This provides a glimpse into a trend in the IT landscape away from a cloud-first-always mindset and toward a more balanced approach, according to Rob Strechay, principal analyst at theCUBE Research.

“Companies and organizations that we talk to are really taking a hard look at where they place their applications going forward, not just going cloud-first or cloud-only,” Strechay said.

Meeting storage compliance standards

Enablement of multicloud platforms also carries the possibility of a higher security risk. Expansion of the attack surface in the cloud, on-premises or at the edge can create a ripe target for bad actors.

In 2023, Dell added a configuration standard called Security Technical Implementation Guide, or STIG, to PowerStore with the goal of meeting federal government compliance requirements. The extension of this security standard to PowerStore could have an impact beyond government agencies, according to Drew Schulke, VP of product management, APEX Console and Common Operating Environment at Dell.

“Our PowerStore product is now STIG compliant, so it meets the highest levels of security standards for the Department of Defense,” Schulke told theCUBE is an interview. “A number of our customers have been deemed ‘critical industries’ by the executive branch of the government today. What we mean by that are utility companies, transportation companies, financial institutions, they’re beginning to be held to the same bar that was previously reserved for Department of Defense agencies.”

Dell supports synchronous and asynchronous replication for PowerStore to minimize the impact of a system failure or breach while simplifying recovery. Data can be replicated on-prem or in the cloud, through an integration with other Dell products.

“You start to look at the ‘better together’ story we have within [our Infrastructure Solutions Group] with our data protection products fully integrated to our PowerProtect portfolio with what we call storage direct,” Schulke said. “From within PowerStore, I, as the storage administrator, can set my backup and my restore policies to a Dell PowerProtect system, which could also be on-prem, it could be on a third site, or it could be in the public cloud. Incredible flexibility in terms of your ability to be resilient if something bad goes wrong.”

Partnerships with Nutanix, Equinix and Nvidia

Dell’s “better together” story also involves partnerships the company has formed to move its storage strategy forward. In August, Dell announced its XC Plus appliance that will allow a software stack from Nutanix Inc. to be deployed on Dell PowerEdge servers. Dell’s PowerFlex software-defined storage will, in turn, be integrated into Nutanix’s platform.

“Dell PowerFlex with Nutanix Cloud enables customers to really unlock their storage and solves for virtualization flexibility,” explained Travis Vigil, senior vice president of product management at Dell, in an interview with theCUBE. “It provides a high scale across anywhere that your applications will run and with it you’ll get a single interface for hardware management, the ability to run your choice of hypervisor, the openness and flexibility to run a variety of ecosystems on a consolidated infrastructure solution and support for private and public cloud deployments.”

Dell and Equinix Metal have been collaborating for over 25 years, and in May the two companies unveiled Dell PowerStore on Equinix Metal at Equinix data centers. The joint initiative will allow customers to receive PowerStore as-a-service and cloud adjacent storage as-a-service for Dell equipment at Equinix.

Dell is also leveraging its partnership with one of the most influential companies in the AI world. In May, Dell and Nvidia Corp. announced that the PowerScale F910 all-flash file storage system would be the first to be certified for use with Nvidia’s DGX SuperPod infrastructure for large-scale AI training and inferencing.

A combination of partnerships and Dell’s own ambitious vision for its technology highlight the rapid pace of development for key players in the compute and storage arena. A steady drumbeat of announcements in 2024 demonstrates the pace at which Dell plans to enhance its offerings to stay abreast of changing industry dynamics brought on by the adoption of AI. What used to take years in development, now takes months, as noted by Dell’s Tarazi in his discussion with theCUBE about the launch of Dell’s most advanced server platform, the XE9680.

“We started to do that more than two years before generative AI came up, probably three,” Tarazi said. “Part of it was AI was just evolving and Nvidia was starting to work on those chipsets, the H100. But then what we announced today with the 9680L only took nine months. So, first process was two to three years of development; this one, nine months.”

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Smarter Storage for Tomorrow’s Opportunities event. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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