UPDATED 14:30 EDT / MAY 22 2018

INFRA

The stats behind PowerMax’s speed and how Dell EMC is future-proofing workloads

Dell EMC is looking to revolutionize the way traditional data centers perform with the introduction of a new high-end storage product, PowerMax. The new line takes the best of Dell and its acquired technologies from EMC and VMware Inc. in hopes of aiding enterprises’ digital transformations for mission-critical workloads.

Calling it the best product Dell EMC has ever launched, Caitlin Gordon (pictured), senior director of product marketing at Dell EMC, shared the stats and specs behind the year-long product in the making.

“I’ve got some good hero numbers for ya,” Gordon said. “Ten million [input/output operations per second]. That makes it the world’s fastest storage array. Full stop. No caveats to that. One-hundred fifty gigabytes per second throughput. We’ve got under 300 microseconds latency. That’s up to 50 percent faster than what we already have with VMAX all-flash,” she added.

Gordon spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), principal at The CTO Advisor, at the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the benefits of PowerMax, its history in the making, and its performance. (* Disclosure below.)

Resiliency at its highest caliber

With souped-up fiber channels, machine-learning capabilities, sophisticated data protection, and fast connectivity, Dell EMC is tearing up the traditional data center with PowerMax and starting anew. As the traditional data center outsourcing market is shrinking, according to Gartner Inc.’s forecast data, enterprises seek a hybrid computing architecture to leverage the best of cloud technologies and on-site application management.

To support this market demand, Dell EMC has bet big on hyperconverged architecture and specialized computing power dedicated to machine learning, pattern recognition, and the ability to determine instantly which data sets need optimization and which data needs to be compressed, Gordon explained.

“… Data centers want to consolidate all of their workloads, all of their practices, processes in a single platform. Ten million IOPS means you will never have to think about if that array will support that workload. It will support everything,” Gordon said.

She also shared details of PowerMax’s underlying architecture supporting the speed required to run its machine learning engine, noting its multi-controller, scale-out architecture. From there, “we built [PowerMax] with end-to-end [non-volatile memory express],” Gordon detailed.

The ubiquity of Non-Volatile Memory Express technology touches the flash drives and the software-configurable drives, as is NVMe-over-Fabric ready, making the PowerMax server ready for ongoing upgrades to support “next-generation media … and NVMe-over-Fabric” in the very near future, according to Gordon. “It’s really NVMe done right,” she added.

What are the practical use cases for that much performance? Gordon anticipates the PowerMax to pick up attention in data centers looking to consolidate “all of their workloads, all of their practices, all of their processes, on a single platform,” she said.
“Ten million IOPS means you will never have to think about if that array can support that workload. You will be able to support everything,” from traditional applications to emerging apps, as well as mainframe operations, according to Gordon. It’s an agnostic approach to workload management, supporting rival and partner workload managers alike, from IBM files to SAP platforms, all on the same system.
“It’s the massive consolidator. It’s kind of an app hoarder,” Gordon concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2018 event. (* Disclosure: Dell EMC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell EMC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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