Dell Technologies Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are pursuing seamless file storage with their recent announcement of Dell PowerScale for Microsoft Azure.

The packaged solution brings Dell’s unstructured data product, OneFS, into Azure, enabling customers to provision Dell’s file storage directly from the Azure portal. It also reduces the complexity of operational silos by delivering a single, unified user experience across the Azure data and on-premises.

“This isn’t really about running the software just in the cloud,” said Rachna Lalwani (pictured, left), senior consultant, director and product manager at Dell. “It’s about creating a truly integrated experience that empowers businesses to do more with their data. What’s also new and unique with this offering is their custom compute instances that are purpose-built for Dell.”

Lalwani and Karl Rautenstrauch (right), principal partner and engagement manager of Azure Storage at Microsoft, spoke with theCUBE’s Rob Strechay during Microsoft Ignite, for an exclusive conversation on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed what Dell PowerScale for Azure encompasses and its potential to support agentic artificial intelligence. (* Disclosure below.)

PowerScale for Azure prioritizes flexibility

Microsoft now offers two choices for Dell PowerScale: a customer managed solution, which is ideal for organizations that want tighter control over infrastructure and deployment, and the Dell managed solution, now in public preview, which offers a more streamlined, hands-off experience.

“We had an opportunity to just perform a traditional lift and shift and bring the OneFS operating system and platform to Azure, but we wanted to do more than that,” Rautenstrauch said. “So … we’ve developed a deeply integrated solution that offers Azure-native provisioning, management, billing [and] monitoring.”

The solution is designed to support the next generation of agentic AI and advanced analytics, with great potential for industries that depend on high throughput and low-latency file access. These include media and entertainment, as well as life sciences.

“One of the biggest wins for customers is the ability to eliminate costly time-consuming architectural changes,” Lalwani said. “What they really gain is the operational consistency across their entire storage landscape.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Microsoft Ignite: 

(* 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